MAO

Shortly after Chiang Kai-shek's release from Xian, the Red Army moved its headquarters from the impoverished cave-village of Bao'an to more accommodating, and slightly more sophisticated, surroundings, sixty miles further east.¹

The old walled town of Yan'an which Zhou Enlai had visited secretly the previous year for his first, clandestine meeting with the Young Marshal, stands on the bend of a shallow rock-strewn river, below an ancient white pagoda, built on a promontory as a talisman against the autumn floods.² Since Song times, it had been an important local trading centre, where camel caravans came from Mongolia with ponies, wool and furs. Woodcutters brought muleloads of sawn timber and whole tree-trunks on high-wheeled oxcarts. Salt was smuggled in from the cities to the south. Beside the Bell Tower, a herbalist sold powdered lion's teeth, dried snakes and other homely remedies. During fairs and market days, the dusty streets were clogged with a shouting, brawling throng of humanity, clad in blue homespun with white kerchiefs round their heads, which fascinated the young soldiers fresh from the parched, bare hill country to the west – and provided a welcome change, too, for the Party leaders and their wives, who on high days and holidays would stroll through the town, savouring the noise and colour.

Mao and He Zizhen, who had still not recovered from the shrapnel wounds she had suffered during the Long March, moved into a wealthy merchant's house in the western part of the walled city, on the lower slopes of Fenghuangshan, Phoenix Mountain. Zhang Wentian, as acting Party leader, occupied the central courtyard, which included a large stone-flagged reception hall where Politburo meetings were held. Zhu De and Peng Dehuai had quarters in another smaller courtyard nearby, where the Office of the Military Commission was housed. For them all, it was a big step up from Bao'an. Mao had a sitting room, where he received visitors, as well as a spacious study, with latticed paper windows, and a large, round wooden bath. Yet creature comforts had their limits. The only heating in the bleak northern winter was from a charcoal brazier and the fire under the kang; water had to be brought from the well; and Mao's papers, the very stuff of his political existence, were filed away in makeshift cabinets fashioned out of Standard Oil drums.³

Over the next decade Yan'an's pagoda, its tiered landscape, its massive crenellated walls and twelfth-century gate, became a symbol of hope, a beacon for progressive-minded young Chinese and Western sympathisers alike. Yet, as one sober-minded traveller, who visited the CCP leaders there in the summer of 1937, noted prosaically, it was in reality, then as now, a ‘rather ordinary Chinese town in a Shaanxi backwater’.⁴ The aura of romance it exuded, ‘of gallant youth, courage and high thinking’, came from the extraordinary collection of people who gathered there.⁵

Michael Lindsay, an aristocratic Englishman whose father was the Master of Balliol College, Oxford, spent part of the war in Yan'an training Red Army radio operators. He would remember it as ‘the heroic age of Chinese communism’. The journalist, Gunther Stein, extolled ‘the steady fighting enthusiasm of a primitive pioneer community … They seem to feel, whether we believe it or not, that the future is theirs.’ Thomas Bisson, an American academic, found an egalitarian commitment, ‘a special quality of life’.⁶ Only the occasional sceptic sensed a darker side – the uniformity of thought; the regimentation; the young bodyguards, armed with Mausers, who hovered, unnoticed, around the top leaders like so many invisible shadows.⁷

Mao had an extraordinary ability to create myths about the communist past at the same time as he fired his supporters with visions of the future.⁸ The myth of ‘the Yan'an Way’ – the distinctive brand of communism which Mao developed during the ten-year interval between the end of the first Chinese civil war and the beginning of the second – would join the legend of the Long March as one of the most enduring emblems of the system he was to create.

Before that could happen, however, he first had to achieve the two long-term goals that he had been consciously striving for ever since his arrival in Shaanxi, two years before: the consolidation of his political power, and the elaboration of a body of Marxist theory bearing his personal stamp.

They were intimately linked. Every communist leader, from Lenin onwards, had based his authority on his theoretical contributions to Marxist doctrine. This was the weakest link in Mao's armour. While his Party rivals, the Returned Students and their leader, Wang Ming, had been soaking up Leninist orthodoxy at Russian universities, he had been away in the wilderness, fighting a guerilla war. Yet there was one way, Mao realised, in which that weakness could be turned into a strength. Ten years earlier, in the winter of 1925, he had called for ‘an ideology produced in Chinese conditions’. In China, for 2,000 years every regime had had its orthodoxy. The communists, too, needed their own distinctive, Chinese form of Marxism. It would enable the Party to tap into the deep vein of Chinese nationalism; erode the influence of Mao's Russian-trained rivals and formidably buttress his own leadership claims.

There, at his urging, the Politburo endorsed the view that Marxism should be applied flexibly to ‘specific, concrete Chinese conditions’, and condemned ‘leftist dogmatism’, meaning slavish adherence to Moscow's ideas.

Three months later he was arguing that the Chinese Party should ‘run things by itself, and have faith in its own abilities’; the Soviet Union was a friend, but its help was secondary. Soviet and Chinese policies coincided, he declared, ‘only where the interests of the Chinese masses coincide with the interests of the Russian masses’.⁹

In June, 1936, the Red Army University was inaugurated in Wayaobu, in a tiny, one-roomed Daoist temple, to serve as a forum where Mao could lecture on political and military affairs.¹⁰ His timing was poor, for the town was abandoned to the nationalists three weeks later. But, following the move to Bao'an, the ‘university’ was re-established, with Lin Biao as its president, in equally humble surroundings – a natural cave, where the Red Army's top commanders squatted on improvised stone stools, taking notes with the aid of a stylus on ‘notepads’ of soft stone.¹¹ That autumn, Mao gave a series of talks there, entitled ‘Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War,’ in which he developed for the first time the notion of China's distinctiveness, ostensibly in the context of military affairs but actually in a broader sense as well:

China's revolutionary war … is waged in the specific environment of China and so has its own specific circumstances and nature [and] … specific laws of its own … Some people … say that it is enough merely to study the experience of revolutionary war in Russia … and the military manuals published by Soviet military organisations. They do not see that these … manuals embody the specific characteristics of the … Soviet Union, and that if we copy and apply them mechanically without allowing any change, we shall … be ‘cutting the feet to fit the shoes’, and will be defeated … Although we must value Soviet experience … we must value even more the experience of China's revolutionary war, because there are many factors specific to the Chinese revolution and the Chinese Red Army.¹²

By emphasising the differences between the Soviet Union and China, and affirming the primacy of indigenous experience, ‘acquired at the cost of our own blood’, Mao was consciously laying the groundwork for the idea of Marxism in a national form. To underline the message, he launched a comprehensive critique of the ‘left opportunists of 1931–34’ – the Returned Student leadership – whom he accused of behaving like ‘hotheads and ignoramuses’ and pursuing ‘theories and practices [which] did not have the slightest flavour of Marxism about them; indeed, they were anti-Marxist.’

Mao was able to get away with such language because he did not name names, and his remarks were not made in public but to a select audience of the military elite. None the less, he was pushing at the limits of what his colleagues would accept. In February 1937, when his old protégé from Anyuan, Liu Shaoqi, now responsible for the Party's underground work in north China, argued that the whole of the past decade had been a period of ‘leftist adventurism’, the rest of the leadership cried foul. By the summer, however, the wind had shifted, and when Liu repeated his charges Mao came out openly in his support. ‘Shaoqi's report is basically correct,’ he told the Politburo. ‘He is like a doctor diagnosing our ailments, pointing out systematically the problems we had before.’ Although the Party had great achievements to its credit, Mao said, it still suffered from a ‘mistaken leftist tradition’. Much more would have to be done if it were to be overcome. The episode marked the start of Liu's rise to become, in the course of the next five years, Mao's most trusted colleague.¹³

While the debate over leftism simmered, Mao resumed his study of Marxism. He had not worked exegetically with philosophical texts since he had been a student, twenty years earlier, and found the prospect intimidating. That winter and the following spring he annotated works by two leading Soviet theoreticians, Ivan Shirokov and Mark Mitin, and by their Chinese translators, Li Da, who had been a member of the Shanghai ‘communist group’ which predated the CCP, and Ai Siqi, the leading figure among the younger generation of academic Marxist theorists.¹⁴ In the summer he began a twice-weekly lecture course, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, on dialectical materialism.¹⁵

His opening talks, tracing the evolution of European philosophy as a struggle between materialism and idealism, first in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then in Germany in the nineteenth, were dreary in the extreme.¹⁶ Mao himself warned his audience, ‘These talks of mine are far from adequate, since I have myself only just begun to study dialectics.’ In the mid-1960s, he was so mortified at the memory of them that he denied authorship altogether.¹⁷ He did break new ground at one point, by arguing that the particular and the general were ‘interconnected and inseparable’, which later provided a theoretical basis for contending that general Marxist principles must always exist in a particular national form.¹⁸ But for the most part he came across as a neophyte, bogged down in a topic he was still struggling to understand.

The next two series were rather better, partly because they were grounded more solidly in Mao's own experience. ‘On Practice’ developed themes from an essay which he had written during his rural investigations in 1930 in Jiangxi, entitled, ‘Oppose Book-worship!’

If you have not investigated a certain problem, you will lose your right to speak on it. Isn't this too brutal? Not in the least. Since you have investigated neither the actual situation nor the historical circumstances of this problem, and have no detailed knowledge of it, anything you say about it could only be nonsense … There are also people who say: ‘Show me where it is written in a book’ … This book-worshipping method of conducting research [is] dangerous … We must study Marxist ‘books’, but they must be integrated with our actual situation. We need ‘books’, but we must definitely correct book-worship that departs from reality. How can we correct book-worship? Only by investigating the actual situation.¹⁹

In ‘On Practice’, this was summed up in the aphorism, ‘Practice is the criterion of truth’:

The movement of change in the world of objective reality is never-ending, and so is man's cognition of truth through practice. Marxism has in no way exhausted truth, but ceaselessly opens up [new] roads to [its] knowledge … Practice, knowledge, again practice and again knowledge. The pattern repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level … Such is the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowing and doing.²⁰

‘On Contradiction’ had antecedents in Mao's student days. The unity of opposites, which had prompted, in his notes on Paulsen, the passage – ‘Life is death and death is life, up is down, dirty is clean, male is female and thick is thin. In essence the many are one and change is permanence’²¹ – he now discovered, like Lenin before him, to be ‘the basic law of dialectics … the most important theoretical base of the proletarian revolution … the fundamental law of the universe and the fundamental law of ideological method’. To formulate correct policies, Mao argued, it was necessary in any given situation to determine what was the principal contradiction, and which was its principal aspect.²²

Later commentators would claim that he had succeeded in imbuing Marxism-Leninism with ‘Chinese national characteristics’, by incorporating elements of ancient Chinese thought.²³ Of more immediate importance, he had begun to put in place a theoretical justification for the Chinese Party to seek its own, independent path to communism.

Marxism holds that the economic base and the productive forces that operate within it determine the political and cultural superstructure of society. At times, Mao now argued, this relationship could be reversed. ‘When the superstructure obstructs the development of the economic base, political and cultural changes become principal and decisive … In general, the material determines the mental. [But] we also, and indeed must, recognise the operation of mental on material things.’²⁴ Here, in Marxist language, was the belief that he had nurtured since childhood in the power of the human will. Decades later, it would provide the ideological underpinning for his two disastrous attempts to transform China by mobilising its spirit – the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

In August 1937, the lecture series came to an abrupt end, as the Japanese advance on Shanghai forced Mao to turn his attention back to more immediate practical issues.²⁵

This did not mean he put aside philosophy. That autumn, at his urging, Ai Siqi came to Yan'an to start a weekly study circle. One of Ai's followers, Chen Boda, a short, agitated man with an incomprehensible Fujianese accent, made worse by a pronounced stammer, became Mao's political secretary. For the next few years Mao read voraciously every Marxist text he could find – even, in another echo of his schooldays, starting a ‘reading diary’ in which he noted which books he had read.²⁶

Later in life Mao developed a genuine delight in philosophical speculation, and his conversation, whether in private or political discussion, became so studded with arcane analogy and enigmatic references to abstruse debating points that even his Politburo colleagues often scrambled to keep up with him. None the less, it is hard to avoid the impression that philosophy was, for Mao, essentially a point of departure – a springboard into the realm of ideas, rather than intrinsically fascinating in itself. ‘On Practice’ and ‘On Contradiction’ were important in establishing his credentials as a theorist, and thus strengthening his claim to Party leadership, but he plainly found them hard work.²⁷ The writing was pedestrian, lacking his usual trenchancy and flair. Pure theory was a means to an end, not a subject Mao took much joy in.

On November 29, 1937, as the Japanese Kwantung Army rolled relentlessly southward across the north China plains, an aircraft appeared in the skies over Yan'an and began to circle the primitive airfield. At first, the look-outs thought it was Japanese, on a periodic bombing mission. But then they made out its Soviet markings, and Mao and the rest of the Politburo hurried to the landing-strip. Out of the plane stepped Wang Ming, the owlish, slightly overweight chief of ‘Stalin's China Section’ – the Returned Student group which had dominated the Party before the Long March – whom the Soviet leader was now sending back to stiffen the Chinese Party's commitment to the united front with Chiang Kai-shek. He was followed by a slightly built, scholarly-looking man named Kang Sheng, who specialised in secret police work; and by Chen Yun, who had travelled to Moscow two-and-a-half years earlier to inform the Russians of the decisions taken at Zunyi.²⁸

Mao had been forewarned by radio of Wang's imminent return, but the journey, by way of Xinjiang, had taken two weeks, and there had been no way of knowing exactly when he would arrive.

That night, the Red Army cooks prepared a banquet. In the speeches of welcome, Mao hailed Wang's coming as a ‘blessing from the sky’, while Zhang Wentian praised his achievements in the Comintern, where he had headed the Chinese delegation. Then the jockeying for position began. Wang was too astute openly to contest Mao's dominance, but he did take issue with him on matters of policy where, he let it be inferred, he had Moscow's support. The crux of their differences, which were given a comprehensive airing at a six-day Politburo meeting starting on December 9, was the united front with the Guomindang.²⁹

Mao had set out his strategy three-and-a-half months earlier at a leadership conference in the town of Luochuan, sixty miles south of Yan'an.³⁰ If China was to defeat Japan, he argued, it was essential to unite all anti-Japanese forces. But within this united front, ‘the CCP must be independent, and we must keep the initiative in our own hands’. Politically, that meant the Party should strive both to play the ‘leading role’ in the war effort; and to expand its own ranks. It must maintain ‘a high degree of vigilance’ towards the Guomindang, understanding that, alongside unity, there would continue to be rivalry and struggle. Militarily, it meant preparing for a protracted war, in which the Eighth Route Army would rely heavily on guerrilla tactics and avoid positional warfare. ‘The basis of guerrilla war’, Mao reminded them, ‘is to spread out and arouse the masses [to join in the struggle], and concentrate regular forces [only] when you can destroy the enemy. Fight when you know you can win. Don't fight battles you may lose!’ The communist main forces, he insisted, must be deployed prudently ‘in the light of the actual situation’ with a view to preserving their strength.

As the autumn wore on, Mao felt events bore out the wisdom of this policy. Chiang Kai-shek, he feared, would try to force the Red Army to bear the brunt of the fighting. No more than half, or at most two-thirds, of communist forces should be committed to the struggle against Japan; the remainder should stay behind to defend the Red base areas, lest Chiang try to double-cross them.³¹ Party commissars were repeatedly warned to defend the CCP's interests and not blindly carry out the GMD's bidding. In telegrams to the Red Army commanders, Mao hammered home the message that guerrilla warfare must be ‘the sole orientation’; fighting set-piece battles would be ‘totally fruitless’.³² When, in late September, Lin Biao's forces ambushed a Japanese column at Pingxingguan, in northern Shanxi, wiping out a thousand enemy troops, he was torn between elation at the first Chinese victory of the war, which raised the Red Army's prestige and caused a surge of rejoicing throughout China, and anger lest Lin, and others, allow their forces to become dangerously exposed.³³ ‘The essence of the contradiction,’ he wrote, ‘is that those sitting on the privy can't shit, and the rest of the country, which is dying to crap, doesn't have a privy to shit in’ – by which he meant that the nationalist army alone could not defeat the Japanese, while the mass of the peasantry, who were eager to fight as guerrillas, were being discouraged from doing so lest they develop into a rival military force.³⁴ A few days later, a GMD campaign to concentrate (and thereby, control) the surviving communist guerrilla forces in south China triggered fresh unease about Chiang's intentions.³⁵ Then came worrying signs, as one north Chinese city after another yielded before the Japanese onslaught, that the GMD might be showing renewed interest in a separate peace with Tokyo. Mao became more convinced than ever that the CCP must keep its own counsel, and ‘reject, criticise and struggle against’ the Guomindang's ‘mistaken policies’.³⁶

Wang Ming, fresh from Moscow, took a very different line. Stalin viewed the GMD as an indispensable partner to keep the Japanese at bay (and prevent them turning their attention to Siberia). The Chinese Party, as a loyal member of the Comintern, should therefore do everything possible to further the Soviet–GMD alliance. The key issue, Wang argued, was ‘to consolidate and expand the unity between the GMD and the CCP’ on a basis not of ‘mutual competition’ but of ‘mutual respect, trust, help and supervision’. Such matters as ‘keeping the initiative in our own hands’, and which party should play the leading role, were secondary. The guiding principle must be: ‘Resisting Japan takes precedence over everything, and everything must be subordinated to resistance to Japan. Everything is subordinate to the united front, and everything must be channelled through the united front.’³⁷

When Wang made these points at the December Politburo meeting, Mao retorted that the strategy elaborated at Luochuan was correct. The CCP had to maintain its independence, otherwise it would be reduced to the status of a GMD auxiliary. Unity and struggle were complementary, he went on, reaching into his newly acquired stock of Marxist dialectics. In the context of the united front, there could not be one without the other.³⁸

To Zhou Enlai, up to then the chief negotiator with the GMD, and to some of the military commanders, itching for a full-scale anti-Japanese offensive, Wang Ming's argument of ‘all hands to the mill’ had definite attractions, especially since it plainly had Soviet backing.³⁹ Mao is said to have commented later, with the slightly self-pitying melodrama he affected on such occasions, that after Wang Ming's return, ‘my authority did not extend beyond my cave’.⁴⁰ In fact, he had enough support to block Wang's proposals, and as neither side was ready to force the issue, the meeting ended in stalemate.

Wang's efforts to strengthen his Party base likewise met with mixed success. He, Chen Yun and Kang Sheng, all full members of the Politburo, joined Mao and Zhang Wentian in the Secretariat. But the post of ‘acting Party leader’, which Zhang had held since early 1935, was allowed to lapse (which prevented Wang seeking it for himself) and, in the interests of ‘collective leadership’ (another device to restrict Wang's influence), it was agreed that no major CCP document might be issued without the approval of at least half of the membership of the Secretariat or the Politburo. Since Wang left shortly afterwards for Wuhan, where he became Secretary of the Party's Yangtse Bureau and head of the CCP Delegation to the Guomindang, these arrangements meant that Mao and Zhang Wentian remained in effective control of day-to-day decision-making. The Politburo also decided, at the Comintern's urging, to begin preparations for the Party's long-delayed Seventh Congress – a move from which, in theory, Wang stood to gain, for he might reasonably expect it to confirm him at least as second-ranking Party leader. But in practice that did not help him either, for Mao was appointed Chairman of the Preparatory Committee and proceeded to hurry slowly.⁴¹

The challenge Wang Ming posed was none the less the most serious Mao had faced for almost two-and-a-half years. Zhang Guotao had ceased to be a threat since his army had been decimated in Gansu. He was still a member of the Politburo, but at Luochuan he had lost his last important post, as Vice-Chairman of the Military Commission. The following spring he would defect to the nationalists. Wang was the chief representative of the Soviet-trained cohort of the Chinese Party whose influence Mao was trying to break. He was ambitious; he had enormous prestige within the Party at large; and he had backers in Moscow. He viewed Mao as essentially a military figure, whose political mantle he could eventually draw to himself. Six years earlier, before his departure for the Soviet Union, Wang had been briefly the pre-eminent Party leader. He had not given up hope of becoming so again.

Initially, Wang's policies appeared to be paying off. In January 1938, German attempts to mediate between China and Japan collapsed, and relations between the CCP and the Guomindang began to show a marked improvement. A communist newspaper, Xinhua ribao, was authorised in Wuhan, giving the Party for the first time a legal means of propagating its ideas in GMD-ruled areas. CCP recruitment in the cities grew apace.⁴²

Nanjing had fallen. By February, Xuzhou was threatened. The next major target would be Wuhan. The defence of that city, Wang now argued, must be the first priority. If the Japanese could be halted there, final victory would be assured. The united front must therefore be strengthened still further, by establishing ‘a unified national army … [with] a united command, a united establishment … united battle plans and united combat’, and by creating a ‘national revolutionary alliance’, in which all political parties – including the GMD and the CCP – would join together in the common cause.⁴³

To Mao, Wang's call ‘to defend important positions to stop the enemy's advance’ recalled Bo Gu's disastrous slogan, ‘Defend every inch of soviet territory!’, which had led to the loss of the Red base area in Jiangxi four years earlier.

When the Politburo next met, at the end of February, he laid out his own, bleak analysis of the future conduct of the war. The Guomindang was corrupt, he said. The CCP lacked the strength to defeat Japan on its own; and the Japanese did not have enough troops to occupy the whole of China. In these circumstances, the conflict would not end soon. Far from defending Wuhan, the correct policy was a strategic withdrawal. To continue the bruising but indecisive battles of recent months was a mistake, Mao warned. China had to preserve its forces for the day when victory might finally be achieved.⁴⁴ He did not actually, on this occasion, use the term, ‘luring the enemy in deep’, but none of his colleagues could have had any doubt as to his meaning: in resisting Japan, China should use the same strategy nationally as the communists had used in Jiangxi to defeat the Guomindang encirclement campaigns.

Three months later, Mao enlarged on these ideas in two essays which were to become military classics, setting out the guiding principles the Red Army would apply for the next seven years, until the end of the war in 1945.

In ‘Problems of Strategy in Guerilla War’, he argued that when a large, weak country (China) was attacked by a small, strong neighbour (Japan), part, or even the greater part, of its territory would fall into the enemy's hands. In these circumstances, the defenders should establish base areas in the mountains, as the Red Army had done in Jiangxi, and fight a war of mutual encirclement, resembling a game of chess,^I in which each side moved out from its strongholds and tried to dominate ‘the spaces on the board’ – the vast areas of the countryside where the guerrilla war would be fought.⁴⁵

In the second essay, ‘On Protracted War’, he tried to prepare the Party, and public opinion at large, now accessible through Xinhua ribao, for the long and arduous conflict that such a strategy would entail.

Capitulation, although still much discussed within the Guomindang, was unlikely, Mao argued, because of ‘the obstinate and peculiarly barbarous character’ of Japanese aggression, which had provoked the unremitting hostility of all sections of the Chinese population. Thus, even though ‘certain subjugationists will again crawl out and collude with [the enemy]’, the nation as a whole would fight on.^II However, a speedy victory was equally improbable. In the initial stage of the war, which might last months or years, China would suffer partial defeats, and Japan would gain partial victories. But as Japan's supply lines became over-extended and war weariness set in, the balance of advantage would change. Subjective factors, Mao maintained, such as people's determination to fight for their homes, their culture and their land, would ultimately prevail:

The so-called theory that ‘weapons decide everything’ [is] … onesided … Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale …⁴⁶

He went on to cite Clausewitz, whose writings on politics and war he had encountered for the first time that spring:

‘War is the continuation of politics.’ In this sense war is politics, and war itself is a political action. Since ancient times there has never been a war that did not have a political character … But war has its own particular characteristics and in this sense it cannot be equated with politics in general. ‘War is a special political technique for the realisation of certain political objectives.’ When politics develops to a certain stage beyond which it cannot proceed by the usual means, war breaks out to sweep the obstacles from the way … It can therefore be said that politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.

The key to victory, Mao concluded, lay in mobilising China's people, so as to create ‘a vast sea of humanity in which the enemy will be swallowed up’.

Once again, the Politburo split. Wang, Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu and Kang Sheng (who would, however, shift his allegiance once he sensed which way the wind was blowing) lined up on one side; Mao, Chen Yun and Zhang Wentian on the other.⁴⁷ Wang, evidently confident that Stalin would support him, agreed that Ren Bishi, now Political Director of the Military Commission, should go to Moscow to seek new instructions.⁴⁸ He then infuriated Mao by claiming publicly, on his return to Wuhan, that his crusade for its defence had the communist leaders’ unanimous support.⁴⁹

From then on, the leaders in Wuhan and Yan'an increasingly constituted two distinct loci of communist power, following conflicting policies and issuing contradictory instructions.

Where Mao in private denounced the nationalists as venal and compromising, Wang and Zhou Enlai called for closer ties with Chiang Kai-shek. Where Mao instructed them to relocate to the countryside, on the grounds that Wuhan was indefensible, they urged the city's inhabitants to emulate Madrid, where the Republicans were holding out heroically against the Spanish fascists.⁵⁰

The military situation was becoming desperate. On June 6, Kaifeng, the then capital of Henan, had fallen and the Japanese were only twenty-five miles from the key rail junction at Zhengzhou. Three days later, on Chiang's orders, nationalist sappers breached the dykes of the Yellow River in the hope that the waters of China's Sorrow would succeed in stemming the enemy advance where his soldiers had failed. 21,000 square miles were flooded. At least half a million peasants drowned – the total may have been as high as 900,000 – and several million more were made homeless. For some weeks the Japanese halted. But by the end of summer they had begun moving forward again, this time along the Yangtse. GMD propagandists pretended that the dykes had been broken in Japanese bombing raids. But the peasants blamed the nationalists anyway. Wide swathes of Anhui and Henan became a no man's land, where Chiang's troops ventured at their peril and the communists found an inexhaustible source of new recruits.⁵¹

In these fraught circumstances, Wang Ming's appeals to the population to rise up in Wuhan's defence conjured up in Guomindang minds the spectre of communist insurrection. In August, Chiang Kai-shek's police announced a ban on communist front organisations. The Yangtse Bureau's efforts to expand the Party's influence by legal means collapsed.⁵²

By then, Wang's cause had suffered an even more serious blow from a quite different quarter. When Ren Bishi reached Moscow, he was welcomed by Mao's old ally, Wang Jiaxiang, who had gone to the Soviet Union to have his war wounds treated and had afterwards stayed on as the CCP's representative to the Comintern. Ren and Wang Jiaxiang had worked together before, as members of the Fourth Plenum delegation to the Jiangxi Soviet in 1931. Both had originally been close to Wang Ming. Both had watched Mao develop into a leader of national stature. Now, they decided to campaign together on Mao's behalf. By July, if not earlier – in any case, several weeks before Wang Ming's policies ran into trouble in Wuhan – Stalin and Dimitrov had agreed that Mao, not Wang, should receive the Kremlin's blessing as the new Chinese Party chief.⁵³

In fact, Wang seems to have deluded himself all along about the extent of Soviet backing. Before his departure for China, Dimitrov had warned him not to try to supplant Mao, whose skills as a military leader had long been recognised in Moscow, and whom Stalin had viewed, at least since the Wayaobu meeting in December 1935, as the dominant Chinese Party figure. Ren Bishi did not find it difficult to convince the Comintern that the time had come to lift any ambiguity that remained.⁵⁴

One morning in the second week of September 1938, Mao went to the South Gate of Yan'an to stand beneath the stone battlements of the massive city wall, waiting for Wang Ming to arrive by road from Xian for a Politburo meeting. He had done the same at Bao'an, two years earlier, when Zhang Guotao's defeated forces straggled in from Gansu. It was a gesture Mao would never need to make again. He knew, as Wang did not, that the game was finally over. As the meeting opened, Wang Jiaxiang read out a Comintern statement approving the CCP's efforts to manage the united front under ‘complex circumstances and very difficult conditions’, and then conveyed two verbal instructions, issued by Dimitrov himself.

In order to resolve the problem of unifying the Party leadership, the CCP leadership should have Mao Zedong as its centre.

There should be an atmosphere of unity and closeness.⁵⁵

The two weeks of discussions that followed were devoted to preparing a Central Committee plenum, the first since January 1934, which Mao had decided to convene as soon as Wang Jiaxiang had arrived with the news of Moscow's decision.

Mao spoke twice, on September 24 and 27. As on earlier occasions when his policies had triumphed – at Zunyi, in January 1935; at Huili, after the successful crossing of the Yangtse, four months later; and at Wayaobu – he went out of his way to be magnanimous, insisting that the main point in the Comintern directive was the need to ‘safeguard intra-Party unity’. At the same time, he put down various markers. The Comintern's instructions, he said, set out ‘guiding principles’ not only for the forthcoming plenum but for the Seventh Congress (which, he indicated, would be charged with appraising the Party's past actions and electing a new leadership in accordance with the principles Dimitrov had laid down). The Party must prepare for a military stalemate – the ‘protracted war’ of which he had written that summer. The united front with the nationalists would be marked by growing struggle.

In his report, Mao developed the broad lines of his attack. Wang Ming and his followers, he implied, having been schooled in foreign Marxism, were out of touch with their own culture:

There is no such thing as abstract Marxism, but only concrete Marxism … If a Chinese communist, who is part of the great Chinese nation, bound to it by his own flesh and blood, talks of Marxism in isolation from Chinese characteristics, that Marxism is a mere abstraction. Consequently the sinification of Marxism – that is to say, making sure that its every manifestation has an indubitably Chinese character – is a problem which the whole Party must understand and solve without delay. Foreign stereotypes must be abolished, there must be less singing of empty, abstract tunes, and dogmatism must be laid to rest … In this matter there are serious shortcomings in our ranks which must be resolutely eliminated.⁵⁷

Thus far, Mao's target was veiled. But to Party veterans, it struck a familiar chord. Years earlier, in Jiangxi, the Returned Students had been known contemptuously as yang fanƶi, ‘gentlemen from a foreign house’.

At the end of October, Wuhan fell, as Mao had predicted it would, dramatising the failure of Wang's strategy.⁵⁸ By then, Wang Ming himself had departed to attend a GMD-sponsored conference on united front policy, leaving the plenum to conclude in his absence. It was the signal for Mao to press home his advantage. He ridiculed Wang's slogan, ‘everything through the united front’, as ‘simply binding us hand and foot’, and resurrected his own catch-phrase, ‘initiative and independence’. Anyone who failed to safeguard that independence, he declared – again sniping at Wang – deserved to be called a ‘right opportunist’. Far from demotivating the masses, a long-drawn-out guerrilla war, in which they would take up guns and fight, was precisely the means to awaken their political consciousness:

Every communist must grasp this truth: ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organisations … We can create schools, create culture, create mass movements … All things grow out of the barrel of a gun … It is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the labouring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and the landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. We are advocates of the abolition of war … but war can only be abolished through war. In order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun. (Emphasis supplied.)⁵⁹

Here was the formula he had first coined at Hankou, in August 1927, which the Party leaders at that time had rejected. Now he charged Wang Ming and the Returned Students with neglecting the importance of military affairs, and with having caused ‘serious losses’ in the Central Soviet Base Area during the years when they held power.

For Mao, the autumn of 1938 was a watershed. Intellectually, his ideas had matured. His writings showed an ease and self-assurance in assimilating Marxist dialectics to the traditional patterns of Chinese thought that had earlier been absent. From now on, Mao would interpret the world in the same, distinctive, elliptical style, reasoning by opposites, analysing the innate contradictions which, in his words, ‘determine the life of all things and push their development forwards’. As he approached his forty-fifth birthday, the main lines of his thought were set: he would continue to refine his ideas, but there would be little more that was radically new.

Politically, his long campaign to dominate the Party had triumphed. Wang Ming was still a force to be reckoned with, but his challenge was at an end. Mao could live with that. In the meantime, he set about consolidating the new powers he had won.

Like Stalin, he chose as his instrument the Party Secretariat, which now took over the day-to-day running of the Party when the Politburo was not in session. Whoever controlled the Secretariat controlled the Central leadership's agenda. Mao became its head, with Wang Jiaxiang, who had done such sterling work for him in Moscow, as his deputy. He rejected a proposal that he become acting General Secretary, while awaiting the Seventh Congress, as Zhang Wentian had done after Zunyi. Mao wanted substantive control; the appearance could come later.⁶⁰

Wang Ming's position was further undermined by a decision to dissolve the Yangtse Bureau, which he headed. Its responsibilities were divided between the Southern Bureau, under Zhou Enlai; a new Central Plains Bureau, headed by Liu Shaoqi; and an upgraded South-Eastern Bureau, under Mao's former adversary, Xiang Ying.

November 1938 saw other changes in Mao's life. Soon after the plenum ended, Japanese bombers, whose sorties against Yan'an had multiplied that year, scored a direct hit on Fenghuangshan. Mao's courtyard was badly damaged. He and the rest of the leadership moved to a cave village at Yangjialing, a narrow valley about three miles north of the Yan'an city walls.⁶¹ But He Zizhen did not go with him. They had separated more than a year earlier. That month, Mao married a willowy young film actress from Shanghai, who had taken the stage name Blue Apple (Lan Ping), and would be known henceforward by the name he had chosen for her: Jiang Qing.⁶²

The women who shared Mao's life all had their part of misfortune. Luo Yigu, the girl his parents chose, suffered the disgrace of rejection and died an early death. Yang Kaihui went to the execution ground proclaiming her loyalty to him, but spiritually crushed by the knowledge that he was living with He Zizhen. She, in her turn, endured extraordinary hardship – forced to abandon three of their six children, losing a fourth, stillborn, and sharing Mao's lot in the darkest periods of his political career; and being terribly wounded herself on the Long March – only to find that, when finally they were able to live normally again, they had grown apart.

Edgar Snow remembered He Zizhen in Bao'an as a gentle, unassuming young woman, half Mao's age, who got on with the household chores, making compote from wild peaches, looking after their fifth, and by then only surviving, child – a daughter, Li Min, born a few months before Snow's arrival. On one occasion, he remembered, ‘both of them suddenly bent over and gave an exclamation of delight at a moth that had languished beside a candle, [a] … lovely thing with wings shaded a delicate apple-green and fringed in a soft rainbow of saffron and rose.’⁶³ But the image of gentleness was deceptive. As Mao himself recognised, He Zizhen had an indomitable spirit, and a tough, unyielding character, rivalling his own. ‘We are like iron and steel,’ he told her after one spectacular row. ‘Unless we try to compromise with each other, both of us will suffer.’ In the event, it was always Mao who had to play the peacemaker. His young wife was too stubborn ever to make the first move.⁶⁴

In the wilds of Jiangxi, and during the perils of the March, they were bound together by a common imperative of political and physical survival. He Zizhen's lack of education – she had left school at sixteen – hardly seemed to matter. She was intelligent, with a quick mind. She loved Mao. And he, in turn, had considerable affection for her.

In Shaanxi, it was different. Mao spent his nights reading philosophy and his days wrestling with Marxist theory. He was hungry for conversation with fellow intellectuals, and eagerly sought out the students who flocked to Yan'an to join the communist cause. He Zizhen felt excluded.

She was not alone in this. Edgar Snow's wife, Helen, who wrote under the pseudonym Nym Wales, recalled a ‘real crisis in Yan'an in the man–woman relationship’, as the women who had made the Long March found their positions threatened by an influx of talented, beautiful young people, bringing with them the loose morals and casual ways of the cosmopolitan cities of the coast. The feminist writer, Ding Ling, and the American, Agnes Smedley, were especially mistrusted for their anarchistic approach to marriage and advocacy of free love – doctrines that sat ill with the puritanical lifestyle the communists enforced in Yan'an. It was in Agnes Smedley's cave, one evening in late May 1937 that Mao's difficulties with He Zizhen came to a head. Wales, Smedley and her interpreter, a young actress named Lily Wu, were making supper when Mao dropped by. They stayed up until 1 a.m. playing rummy, a game which Snow had introduced to the communists in Bao'an a year earlier, and for which Mao, in particular, had developed a real passion. Helen Snow recorded in her diary:

He was in high spirits that evening … Agnes looked up at [him] worshipfully, with her large blue eyes, which at times had a fanatical gleam. Lily Wu was also looking at Mao with hero-worship. A bit later, I was stunned to see Lily walk over and sit beside Mao on the bench, putting her hand on his knee (very timidly). Lily announced that she had had too much wine … Mao also appeared startled, but he would have been something of a cad to push her away rudely, and he was obviously amused. He also announced that he had had too much wine. Lily then ventured to take hold of Mao's hand, which she repeated from time to time during the evening.⁶⁵

At the time, no one paid much attention. Helen Snow accepted at face value Lily Wu's explanation that she had had too much to drink. Lily, she wrote, was ‘very pretty with long curls, recently arrived in Yan'an and cutting rather a wide swathe’, and she was unconventional enough – the only woman in Yan'an to wear lipstick – for Mao also to pass it off as of no consequence.^III He Zizhen, however, to whose ears the story came next day, took a very different view. She bottled up her feelings, she wrote later, until they ate away her heart.⁶⁶ When Mao was again late returning home, she stormed round to her young rival's cave. Smedley heard her push open the door:

A woman's shrill voice broke the silence. ‘You idiot! How dare you fool me and sneak into the home of this little bourgeois dance hall strumpet …’ There was Mao's wife standing beside [her husband] beating him with a long-handled flashlight. [She] kept hitting him and shouting until she was out of breath … Mao finally stood up. He looked tired and his voice was quietly severe. ‘Be quiet, Zizhen. There's nothing shameful in the relationship between Comrade Wu and myself. We were just talking. You're ruining yourself as a communist …’ Lily … was standing with her back against the wall like a terrified kitten before a tiger … Brandishing the flashlight she held in one hand, [He Zizhen] scratched Lily's face with the other and pulled her hair. Blood [was] flowing from her head.⁶⁷

At that point He Zizhen turned on Smedley, who responded by giving her a black eye. She was then escorted home by three of Mao's bodyguards, still vituperating hysterically against her rival.

Shortly afterwards, He discovered that, yet again, she was pregnant. It was the final straw. She was still only twenty-seven years old. She wanted to have a life of her own – not just to go on bearing children for a man from whom she felt increasingly estranged. That summer she told Mao she had decided to leave him.⁶⁸

He Zizhen recalled in her memoirs, published after his death, that he pleaded with her to stay, reminding her of how much they had been through together and telling her how much he cared for her. To prove his sincerity, he ordered both Lily Wu and Smedley to leave Yan'an. But to no avail. At the beginning of August, she set out for Xian, leaving the little girl, Li Min, then only twenty months old, in Mao's care.

He sent her a traditional wooden cosmetic box, which his bodyguards had made, together with a fruit-knife and other articles she had cherished. Again, he asked her to reconsider. Still she would not change her mind.

When Shanghai, her original destination, fell to the Japanese, she set out across Xinjiang to Urumqi, a thousand miles to the east. Thence, the following spring, ignoring a further plea from Mao and disobeying a direct order from the Party hierarchy to return at once to Yan'an, she travelled on to the Soviet Union, where at last she was able to get proper medical treatment for the shrapnel still lodged in her body.

Far from being a new beginning, He Zizhen's sojourn in Moscow dragged her deeper into despair. The baby boy, Mao's son, born soon after she arrived there, died of pneumonia ten months later. While she was still grieving for him, news came that Mao had remarried. She told friends she wished him well, and threw herself into studying. But the image of her dead son haunted her. She became morbidly depressed, and the local authorities eventually had her committed to a mental asylum. Mao arranged for her to return to China in 1947. She continued to receive psychiatric treatment, and for the rest of her life suffered from a persecution complex, convinced that her doctors were trying to poison her.⁶⁹

She was then twenty-three years old, a slender, sophisticated young woman, with a wide, sensual mouth, boyish figure and vivacious smile, who bore more than a passing resemblance to He Zizhen as she had looked as a teenager, at the time Mao had first met her, nearly ten years before.

Like the Party's security chief, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing hailed from a small town in Shandong, about fifty miles from the former German treaty port of Qingdao. Her father was a carpenter; her mother worked for a time as a servant in the household of Kang's gentry parents, while moonlighting as a prostitute. By her own account, Jiang grew up amid crushing poverty. When she was still a small child, her mother fled with her from the family home to escape her husband's beatings. At the age of sixteen, she in turn ran away to join a theatre troupe. Three years later, in the spring of 1933, she reached Shanghai, where she became a minor star, eventually graduating to leading roles in leftist films, like Blood on Wolf Mountain, which urged resistance to Japan, and Western dramas, including Ibsen's The Doll's House. In the process, she was arrested by the Guomindang as a suspected communist and held for some months in prison before suddenly being released, supposedly on the intervention of a mysterious, anonymous foreigner. She had numerous well-publicised love-affairs, and married at least twice, the second time to a literary critic, Tang Na, whom she so enraged that on several occasions he attempted suicide.

Her motives in travelling to Yan'an were mixed. In Shanghai, her acting career had stalled. Her marriage to the mercurial Tang Na was a liability. She was canny enough to work out that if the war with Japan continued, the city would be a prime target. Yan'an, since the Xian Incident, had been the destination of choice for fashionable young Chinese radicals. Her mentor in the Party (and one-time lover), Yu Qiwei, a young White Area communist underground leader who had been instrumental in bringing Edgar Snow to Bao'an, was also making his way there. On every count, it seemed the best place to be.

Like all new arrivals, she had to undergo a screening process. At first, this did not go well. She had no proof that she had joined the Party in 1932, as she claimed, and there were embarrassing questions (which were never entirely laid to rest) about exactly how she had managed to extricate herself from the clutches of her GMD jailers two years earlier. But in October 1937, Yu Qiwei finally arrived and vouched for her Party credentials, and the following month she was allowed to begin studying Marxism-Leninism at the Party School. Six months later, in April 1938, she moved to the Lu Xun Academy for Literature and Art as an administrative assistant.⁷¹

There, that summer, she contrived to catch Mao's eye. There are many stories, all more or less scurrilous, and all unverifiable, about how she did so. All that appears certain is that she, not he, took the initiative. They had been formally introduced soon after she arrived, but at that point Mao was still bent on repairing his relationship with He Zizhen. Now he encountered her again, probably at a theatrical performance, just as he was finally coming to accept that his wife had indeed left him, and that nothing he could do would bring her back.⁷² Helen Snow, reflecting on his dalliance with Lily Wu, had noted: ‘Mao was the type of man … who especially liked women … [He] liked modern-minded women …’⁷³ Mao's bed was empty, and Jiang Qing fitted the bill.

In August, exactly a year after her arrival in Yan'an (and He Zizhen's departure), she was transferred to work as Mao's assistant, nominally attached to the Military Commission. That autumn they began living together openly, and in November Mao gave a series of dinners for fellow Politburo members at which Jiang Qing officiated as hostess.⁷⁴ That was the sum of their ‘marriage’. There was no official ceremony, and still less any official divorce. Nor was there any truth to the story, widely circulated after Mao's death, that his peers had imposed three conditions before allowing him to ‘marry’ Jiang Qing: that she should hold no Party post and play no public role, instead occupying herself solely with his private affairs.⁷⁵

Where there was real concern was over Jiang Qing's past. With her promiscuous Shanghai background; the lingering uncertainties over how she had joined the Party; and the persistent rumours that she had made a deal with the Guomindang to get out of jail – was she an appropriate partner for Mao? Xiang Ying, whose South-Eastern Bureau was responsible for Shanghai, was sufficiently alarmed to write to Mao's confidential secretary, Ye Zilong, warning him about the rumours of her conduct circulating in the city. He concluded bluntly: ‘This person is not suitable to marry the Chairman.’ Others were more circumspect, but entertained similar doubts.⁷⁶

Officially, he maintained that Kang Sheng, as head of the Party's security apparatus, had conducted a thorough investigation, and found that Jiang Qing had no serious problems. Kang, of course, had his own agenda. Supporting his fellow townswoman was not only a way of ingratiating himself with Mao (and with Jiang Qing herself), but also promised him a privileged channel to the Chairman's ear through Mao's pillow companion.⁷⁷

As further reassurance, therefore, Mao decided that his new wife should stay in the background, running his private secretariat, as He Zizhen and Yang Kaihui had before her, with no official responsibilities.⁷⁸ Jiang Qing may have bridled at this arrangement, but it suited Mao very well. He was attracted by her youth and sexuality, just as he had been drawn to Lily Wu. But he wanted a helpmate, not a partner in histrionics. For all his intellectualising about the equal status of women, Mao did not brook rivals, least of all in his marriage-bed.

For a while, the doubters were silenced. Jiang Qing knitted Mao pullovers, and cooked for him the spicy Hunanese dishes he liked. His bodyguard at that time, Li Yinqiao, remembered:

She had jet-black hair, which she wore with a fringe and a hair-band, cut long at the back, delicate eyebrows and bright eyes, a nice nose and generous mouth … In Yan'an, we always thought of her as a star. Her calligraphy, especially in cursive script, was good, she liked horse-riding and playing cards … She could cut out clothes for herself, and look good … At that time she was close to the ordinary people. She cut the bodyguards’ hair and taught them how to sew. On the march, she encouraged them, and taught them guessing games … In the winter, everyone wore thick clothes. But she cut hers so they fitted her tightly, to show off her figure … She was very proud; she liked to be in the limelight. She really liked showing off.⁷⁹

In August 1940, to Mao's delight, she gave birth to a baby daughter, Li Na (who took her surname, like He Zizhen's daughter, Li Min, from Mao's Party alias, Li Desheng; the girls’ given names came from an aphorism in the Confucian Analects – ‘A gentleman should be slow to speak and quick to act’ – na meaning slow, min quick).⁸⁰ She was his ninth child, of whom four had survived. Child-bearing, however, was not to Jiang Qing's taste, and she made plain she would not submit to the constant pregnancies that He Zizhen had endured. A year later, when she conceived again, she insisted on having an abortion. The operation was botched. She developed a high fever, and soon afterwards found she was also suffering from tuberculosis. She then had herself sterilised.⁸¹

Mao, who, despite his progressive ideas in other spheres, conserved the traditional Chinese attitude equating numerous offspring with happiness, was not pleased.

Other differences arose, too. Mao frequently worked all night and slept during the day. He Zizhen had gone along with these arrangements. Jiang Qing refused. At Yangjialing, Mao had a bed made up in his study so that he could work in peace. After 1942, when they moved to Zaoyuan (Date Garden), another valley two miles further out from Yan'an, where Zhu De and the Red Army Command were based, Jiang Qing occupied separate quarters.⁸²

To the outside world, she appeared a devoted young wife and mother. But, in private, her relationship with Mao was often turbulent. Her importunities that he intercede with the Party hierarchy to get her special treatment particularly enraged him. Then he would shout at her furiously, calling her a bitch and ordering her out of his presence.

Apart from Kang Sheng, Chen Boda and a handful of others, the rest of the Party elite never entirely accepted her. Mao's bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, recalled being at lunch with her one day when she suddenly screamed out: ‘Mother-fucking monsters!’ Seeing his stunned expression, she explained hastily that she meant not him but ‘those people in the Party’ who refused to accept her political bona fides.⁸³ Twenty-five years later, when she became a power in her own right during the Cultural Revolution, she would have her revenge for these perceived humiliations.

It was to Li Yinqiao, too, that Mao confessed, one day in 1947, his own growing disenchantment with her. ‘I didn't marry very well,’ he said ruefully. ‘I rushed into it too lightly.’ Then he sighed. ‘Jiang Qing’, he said, ‘is my wife. If she were one of my staff, I'd get rid of her as soon as I could … But there's nothing I can do. I've just got to put up with her.’⁸⁴ By then, Mao's son, Anying, and Li Min were both living in his household.^IV He would have been less than human if these flesh-and-blood reminders of earlier, happier marriages had not led him to make mental comparisons that were not to Jiang Qing's advantage.⁸⁵ Even without their presence, though, the relationship was turning sour. In public, appearances were maintained. But from the late 1940s on, Mao increasingly sought female companionship elsewhere.

While Mao was, by his own admission, making a mess of his personal life, his political cause prospered. The Party had acknowledged him as its leader. The united front with the Guomindang had given the communists legitimacy – and the potential to win a mass following outside the remote base areas where Chiang Kai-shek had until then confined them – that they had never had before.

Throughout 1938, whatever Mao's private reservations, he had insisted publicly that the GMD should be given the benefit of the doubt. ‘Love and Protect the Communist Party; make it develop and expand. Do the same for the Guomindang,’ he declared. The nationalist party had a ‘glorious history [and] a bright future’; it was ‘the backbone’ of the struggle against Japan, and Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek were both 'great leaders’.⁸⁶

In part, this was a cover to protect himself against Wang Ming's charges that he was too mistrustful of nationalist intentions. In part it was reassurance to Moscow that, despite the sidelining of the Returned Students, the Chinese communists had the Kremlin's interests at heart. But it also reflected an underlying truth. The Guomindang army had 1.7 million men at the outset of the war; the communists roughly 40,000. Chiang's troops had to bear the main burden of resistance to Japan because they alone had the strength to do so. From the Marco Polo bridge incident on, it was the nationalist armies which fought the big conventional battles to try to slow the Japanese advance, while Mao's forces engaged in guerrilla warfare behind Japanese lines. That would remain the pattern for the duration of the war.⁸⁷

Until the winter of that year, relations between the CCP and the GMD were relatively smooth. But in January 1939, the same month that Chiang Kai-shek agreed to the setting up of a CCP Liaison Office in Chongqing, headed by Zhou Enlai, the GMD leaders approved a secret decision to ‘corrode, contain, restrict and combat’ the Communist Party.⁸⁸ It was prompted by the belated realisation that Mao was using the communists’ newfound freedom of action not only to harass the enemy but to establish communist base areas in the spaces between the zones of Japanese occupation, procuring a dramatic expansion of communist military strength. By the end of 1938, the Eighth Route Army had grown five times, to 200,000 men. Two years later it would exceed half a million.⁸⁹ Not all the recruits had weapons, or sufficient ammunition, and further growth would be slowed because the communist bases could not produce enough food to support such an enormous force. None the less, for Chiang, it was the stuff of nightmares. Both he and Mao were well aware that the alliance against their common enemy, Japan, would last only as long as the war and that the moment it was over, the fight to determine which of them would rule China would resume more fiercely then ever. Preventing the growth of communist strength was no less important to the nationalists than defeating Japan. That spring Chiang's forces launched an offensive to beat back communist expansion in the north-west and in neighbouring Shaanxi, provoking Mao to warn ‘We will not attack unless we are attacked ourselves. But if we are attacked, we will certainly counter-attack.’⁹⁰ The following year 400,000 nationalist troops were detached from the war effort to blockade the area around Yan'an, known as the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia Border Region, and Chiang cancelled a government subsidy to the communists of 180,000 US dollars a month.

The struggle within China was subsumed into a larger conflict with a multitude of players whose motives and interactions were often opaque.

Mao's principal ally, Stalin, had made clear that Moscow's over-riding priority was to use Chiang's forces to tie down the Japanese army in order to prevent it attacking Russia. Soviet military aid went primarily to the GMD and the communists were put on notice to do nothing which might encourage Chiang to accept a ‘Far Eastern Munich’ and sign a separate peace with Tokyo. But when Chiang cut off aid to the communists, Moscow promptly took up the slack, sending Yan'an a monthly subsidy of 300,000 US dollars.^V Chiang, on his side, had to juggle the competing pressures of the Axis powers, the Russians, and Britain and America, whose attitudes to the nationalists, to Japan and to each other, were in a state of constant flux. Both men had to deal with unforeseeable, tectonic shifts in the relations between the warring powers.

Mao, who had never travelled abroad and had little experience of foreigners, found it especially hard to read these developments correctly. When Britain and France declared war on Germany, he saw it as essentially a replay of the First World War. ‘The old distinction⁹¹ between fascist and democratic states no longer holds,’ he wrote. ‘It's simply a robber war with justice on neither side.’⁹² That had to be abruptly jettisoned when, in June 1941, Russia entered the war. Pearl Harbor was equally unexpected and had no less momentous consequences: Britain and America, which until then Mao had regarded as hostile imperialist powers, joined the USSR and China in a global anti-Axis alliance.

While Mao grappled with the implications of these far-away events, his strategy at home was to push the united front to the limit in order to maximise communist gains while stopping just short of an open break.

It was a delicate exercise. By the autumn of 1940, what were euphemistically termed ‘frictions’ between the two sides were accumulating in both north and south China.⁹³ Whether because Mao's attention was distracted by the constantly changing international environment, or for other reasons, he failed to notice that Chiang's patience was fraying. The stage was being set for the worst communist military setback of the war.

During the summer the nationalists had suffered a series of defeats at the hands of the communist New Fourth Army in Anhui and Jiangsu. One of Mao's goal was to link the areas controlled by the New Fourth, which had been formed by guerrillas who had stayed behind in southern and central China at the time of the Long March, with the northern Chinese bases held by the Eighth Route Army. Chiang decided this must be prevented at all costs. In July he ordered the communist forces to withdraw north of the Yellow River within a month – an injunction repeated publicly and in stronger terms in October. Xiang Ying, the political commissar of the Fourth Army headquarters detachment in southern Anhui, was reluctant to move because his troops would have to make their way through Japanese lines. Mao procrastinated, issuing conflicting instructions as his reading of Chiang's mood changed. Finally, at midnight on January 4, 1941, Xiang's detachment set out along a route which Mao had approved. Two days later they walked into a nationalist ambush. After a week of fierce fighting – in which aircraft, both nationalist and Japanese (who were delighted to see their opponents at each other's throats), bombed and strafed the villages where the communist remnants were trying to regroup – some 9,000 soldiers and non-combatants, including nurses, doctors, officers’ families, porters and stretcher-bearers, were killed or taken prisoner. A thousand others escaped and made their way in small groups to safe areas north of the Yangtse.

Mao was not solely responsible for the debacle. But his indecision was a major factor in it. As usual in such situations – regardless of the political system – the leadership moved with unseemly haste to find a suitable scapegoat. Barely 24 hours after the fighting ended, a secret Central Committee resolution designated Xiang Ying as the culprit. Xiang had survived the bloodbath but soon afterwards was murdered by a communist renegade, which conveniently laid the matter to rest.⁹⁴

The South Anhui Incident, as it came to be known, brought relations between the communists and the GMD to breaking point. Mao threatened ‘a nationwide political and military counter-offensive’.⁹⁵ Direct contacts between Yan'an and Chiang Kai-shek's headquarters in Chongqing were suspended, CCP liaison offices closed in other provincial cities and communist forces in the North placed on high alert. But, before long, both sides began to row back. Even in this extremity, the united front was too valuable for the communists to give up. Party membership was rising so fast that the Politburo had to halt new admissions because the existing structure could no longer cope with them. To Mao, the front had become a ‘magic weapon’, smoothing the communists’ path to power.⁹⁶ Chiang Kai-shek knew that. But his hands were also tied. The war with Japan, which had brought the alliance into being in the first place, meant that he could not unilaterally end it without reviving charges that he was more interested in fighting the Reds than fighting the Japanese.

In the end,[Q1] the tragedy that had befallen Xiang Ying's men worked to the communists’ advantage. Chiang's Western allies were exasperated to find him attacking forces which were supposed to be on his side. Roosevelt personally signalled his displeasure. Within China there were protests from liberals and progressives, and even from some of Chiang's own commanders.⁹⁷

By February, Mao was able to write: ‘Chiang has never been so besieged with reproach[es] from within and without; we have never won such extensive support from the people (both at home and abroad) … This is our greatest victory.’⁹⁸

None the less, the affair left scars. A week after the South Anhui incident, Mao grumbled to Zhou Enlai that Moscow's policy towards the Guomindang was ‘the opposite of ours [and has been] for several months now’, but that there was nothing they could do about it.⁹⁹ Between the CCP and the GMD, military cooperation was effectively at an end. Chiang, Mao concluded, had shot his bolt: the nationalists had put the united front in jeopardy to try to halt communist expansion – and they had failed. They would not attempt to do so again.¹⁰⁰

Henceforward the two sides would hold their fire, conserve their forces, and prepare for the final battles which each knew had to follow Japan's still distant but now foreseeable defeat.

The method, this time, was to be a reappraisal of Party history, designed to prove even to the most sceptical that Wang Ming and his allies had been wrong, not just over united-front policy, but ever since 1931, while Mao alone had been consistently correct.

In the four years since the war with Japan had begun, a good deal of groundwork had already been laid. Stalin had signalled confidentially at the beginning of 1940 that Wang's fate no longer concerned him. The previous October, Pavel Mif, the former rector of the Sun Yat-sen University, who had been the Returned Students’ main Soviet backer, had been shot as an ‘enemy of the people’. That same month Mao had written of the need to achieve a common understanding of Party history, in order to consolidate the Party ‘ideologically, politically and organisationally’, and ‘avoid repeating historical mistakes’. Only since Zunyi, he claimed, had the Party been ‘soundly on the Bolshevik road’.¹⁰¹ To Wang Ming, whose supporters had been in power for the four years before Zunyi, the writing was on the wall: Mao wanted nothing less than a wholesale, repudiation of the policies they had stood for.

To try to head off this challenge, Wang sketched the basis for a trade-off. He would not dispute Mao's present primacy. But neither should Mao try to negate Wang's own past contributions.¹⁰²

For a time, this compromise seemed to hold. But then, in December 1940, Mao issued a comprehensive list of what he considered to be the Wang Ming group's ‘ultra-leftist errors’ in Jiangxi:

There was the economic elimination of the capitalist class (the ultra-Left policies on labour and taxation) and of the rich peasants (by allotting them poor land); the physical elimination of the landlords (by not allotting them any land); the attack on the intellectuals; the ‘Left’ deviation in the suppression of counter-revolutionaries; the monopolising by communists of the organs of political power …; the ultra-Left military policy (of attacking the big cities, and denying the role of guerilla warfare) …; and the policy within the Party of attacks on comrades through the abuse of disciplinary measures. These ultra-Left policies … caused great losses to the Party and the revolution.¹⁰³

Still Mao named no names. And when Liu Shaoqi urged him to characterise the errors as ‘mistakes of political line’, he prudently refused. ‘Melons ripen,’ Kang Sheng quoted him as saying. ‘Don't pick them when they are not yet ripe. When they are ready, they will just drop off. In struggle, one mustn't be too rigid.’¹⁰⁴

In the autumn of 1941, as the CCP and the Guomindang drew back from the brink after the New Fourth Army incident, Mao decided the time had finally come to launch the great political offensive that he had been so carefully preparing.

The Yan'an Rectification Campaign, as it would be called, would last nearly four years. By the time it ended, Mao would no longer head a collective leadership. He would be the one man who decided all – a demiurge, set on a pedestal, towering above his nominal colleagues, beyond institutional control.

He opened his attack at an enlarged Politburo meeting, which began on September 10, 1941, with a critique of ‘subjectivism’, meaning the failure to adapt Party policies to the reality of Chinese conditions. As a general proposition, this had been a theme of Mao's speeches since the spring. Now he became more specific. The ‘Li Lisan line’ in 1930 had been one such instance, he said. The policies of the Fourth Plenum leadership, from 1931 to 1934, had been still more damaging. Moreover, the problem was not yet over. Subjectivism, sectarianism and dogmatism were still doing a great deal of harm, and a mass movement must be launched to fight them.

When the meeting concluded, six weeks later, Mao had got almost everything he wanted. Wang Ming and Bo Gu had been condemned for their ‘erroneous leftist line’ in Jiangxi, and many of their former associates, including Zhang Wentian, had made self-criticisms. The one residual disagreement was over exactly when the Returned Students’ errors had begun – at the Fourth Plenum itself, in January 1931, as Mao argued; or, as Wang Ming preferred, the following September, after Wang had returned to Moscow, leaving Bo Gu in charge? But even that had the happy result of dividing the two principal Returned Student leaders.

Several factors had combined to make this breakthrough possible. By sheer force of repetition, Mao's calls over the previous five years for a distinctively Chinese way had finally instilled themselves into the Party's collective consciousness. He himself exemplified that approach, and by 1941 his record spoke for itself. Since Zunyi, the Party had prospered; before, under the Returned Students, it had come to the brink of destruction. Moreover, Mao promised his colleagues that the coming movement would be aimed at ‘rectifying’ mistaken ideas, not the people who held them. The guideline would be ‘curing the sickness to save the patient’, not the ‘harsh struggle and merciless blows’ that had characterised previous political campaigns.

Mao would later describe this Politburo meeting in September 1941 as one of the half-dozen crucial steps in his rise to supreme power. It lined up the rest of the leadership behind him (except Wang and Bo, who refused to admit their errors), and endorsed the practical arrangements for the rectification movement he was about to unleash.¹⁰⁵

Up to this point, all Mao's manoeuvring had been confined to the uppermost echelons of the Party elite. Probably fewer than 150 people, in a Party which by then had 800,000 members, were aware of the struggle that was unfolding. Even Peng Dehuai, a full Politburo member, admitted afterwards that he did not really grasp what was involved until more than a year later. Rank-and-file members had no inkling of what was going on.¹⁰⁶

That month Mao gave two major speeches to the Central Party School in which he set out the movement's goals. ‘We are communists’, he told them, ‘so we must keep our ranks in good order, we must march in step.’¹⁰⁷ Then he explained the nature of the music he wanted them to march to:

As an arrow is to the target, so is Marxism-Leninism to the Chinese revolution. Some comrades, however, are ‘shooting without a target’ … at random … Others merely stroke the arrow fondly, exclaiming, ‘What a fine arrow! What a fine arrow!’ but never want to shoot it … The arrow of Marxism-Leninism must be used to shoot at the target … Why otherwise would we want to study it? We do not study Marxism-Leninism because it is pleasing to the eye, or because it has some mystical value, like the doctrines of the Daoist priests who ascend Maoshan to learn how to subdue devils and evil spirits. Marxism-Leninism has no beauty, nor has it any mystical value. It is only extremely useful … Those who regard Marxism-Leninism as religious dogma show … blind ignorance. We must tell them openly, ‘Your dogma is of no use,’ or, to speak crudely, ‘Your dogma is of less use than dogshit.’ Dogshit can fertilise fields and man's shit can feed dogs. But dogmas? They can't fertilise fields and they can't feed dogs. What use are they?¹⁰⁸

In future, he declared, Party officials would be judged by whether they could apply ‘the standpoint, concepts and method of Marxism-Leninism’ to solve practical problems, not on their ability to ‘read ten thousand volumes by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and … recite every sentence from memory’.¹⁰⁹

Book-learning in general, ever one of Mao's bêtes-noires, came in for a memorable drubbing:

Cooking food and preparing meals is truly one of the arts. But what about book-learning? If you do nothing but read, you have only to be able to recognise three to five thousand characters … [and] hold some book in your hand, and the public will provide you with a living … But books cannot walk … [Reading them] is … a great deal simpler than for a cook to prepare a meal, far easier than for him to slaughter a pig. He has to catch the pig. The pig can run. (Laughter in the hall) He slaughters him. The pig squeals. (Laughter) A book placed on a desk cannot run, neither can it squeal … (Laughter) Is there anything easier? Therefore, I advise those of you who have only book-learning and as yet no contact with reality … to realise your own shortcomings and make your attitudes a bit more humble.¹¹⁰

There was much more in the same vein. Empty, abstract speeches which were ‘like the foot-bindings of a slattern, long and foul-smelling’, ‘individualism’ which violated Party discipline, and ‘foreign formalism’ were vigorously denounced:

We must plant our backsides on the body of China. We must study world capitalism and socialism, but if we want to be clear about their relations to the history of the Chinese Party, it's all a matter of where you put your bottom … When we study China, we must take China as the centre … We have some comrades who have a malady, namely that they take foreign countries as the centre and act like phonographs, mechanically swallowing whole foreign things and transporting them to China.¹¹¹

These strictures were directed less at Wang Ming and his remnant followers, already broken reeds, than at the mind-set they represented. Over the next twelve months, as the Party rank and file, at lecture meetings and in small group discussions, absorbed Mao's ideas and the view of Party history that flowed from them, the intellectual centre of gravity of the Chinese Party shifted. The fount of Marxist-Leninist wisdom was no longer in Moscow but in Yan'an.

In March 1943, the composition of the Party's ruling organs was belatedly brought into line with the new political reality which the Rectification Campaign had produced. Mao was named Chairman of the Politburo, and of a new three-man Secretariat, in which he was joined by Liu Shaoqi, now confirmed, in fact if not yet in name, as second-ranking Party leader, and by Ren Bishi, Wang Jiaxing's partner in promoting Mao's cause in Moscow five years earlier. Wang himself became deputy head of the Propaganda Department under Mao, while Kang Sheng, whose career had also taken off since he had aligned himself with Mao in 1938, became deputy head, under Liu, of the other key Central body, the Organisation Department. Wang Ming, who had been a member of the top leadership since 1931, was excluded from any decision-making role.¹¹²

The real innovation, however, lay in the fine print. As before, the Secretariat was empowered to take decisions when the Politburo was not in session. But this time it was explicitly stated that, should its members fail to agree, Mao would have the final say. This was much more than just a matter of giving him a casting vote, or even veto power. It meant that even if both the other members of the Secretariat disagreed, Mao's views would prevail.

In wartime, perhaps, such an extraordinary concentration of authority in the hands of one man may have seemed justified. Mao's colleagues could reassure themselves that the Politburo and the Central Committee, both collegiate institutions, retained ultimate power. But the truth was that a bandwagon was rolling. By then, even Bo Gu had capitulated. Wang Ming, alone, remained the last, defiant hold-out, an example for others to avoid. The rest of the leadership, having watched Mao's rise, and knowing that their own futures would depend on how they handled their relations with him, had little interest in making a stand against what most of them regarded anyway as an inevitable accretion of power.

By 1943, Mao had achieved a status in his own Party that no Chinese communist leader had ever had before.

But his role was still limited to the areas the communists controlled, only a small part of the country as a whole. The next step would entail the fashioning of a mythology of personality and ideas which would enable him, over the next six years, to inspire and direct an armed struggle that would win the support of the population at large, unifying, this time, not merely the Party but all of China behind the communist cause.

Like the Cultural Revolution, twenty-five years later – of which it was a precursor, establishing a pattern which would apply in all the major political movements which followed – the Yan'an Rectification Campaign was far more than just a struggle for power. It was an attempt to bring about fundamental change in the way people thought.

Its roots lay in the logic of united-front politics, which had required the Party dramatically to broaden its appeal. At Wayaobu, in December 1935, the Politburo had agreed, at Mao's urging, that Party membership should be open to ‘all who are willing to fight for the Communist Party's positions, regardless of their class origin’.¹¹³ After the Comintern demurred, that formula was withdrawn. But the open-door approach continued. In order to win over the so-called ‘intermediate classes’ – the patriotic bourgeoisie, the small and middle landlords and intellectuals – that made up the rank and file of the GMD's political constituency, the CCP moderated its policies. In an article in March 1940, entitled, ‘On New Democracy’, Mao noted that while socialism remained the ultimate goal, it was still a very long way off. The current task, which would take many years, was to fight imperialism and feudalism.

This policy of class collaboration succeeded beyond all expectations. In the three years from the Marco Polo Bridge incident to mid-1940, Party membership grew almost twentyfold. But many if not most of the new recruits were drawn by patriotism more than communist conviction.¹¹⁴

The next problem, therefore, was how to weld this vast, disparate membership into a disciplined political force.

In the early 1930s, the Communist Party had been ‘Bolshevised’ by fear. But the wave of revulsion that had generated ruled out any repetition, even had Mao wanted it – and by the end of the Long March, he, too, had recognised that there had to be a better way of resolving inner-Party differences. Men who had shared such incredible hardships, he told Xu Haidong in 1935, could not be fundamentally disloyal.¹¹⁵ Subsequently, various attempts were made to devise new methods, including ‘new leaf rallies’, where erring comrades confessed their faults and pledged publicly to make a new start. But the answer Mao eventually came up with stemmed from the Classical teachings of his youth.

‘If our Party's style is completely orthodox,’ he announced at the beginning of the Rectification Campaign, ‘the people of the entire nation will learn from us.’ The force of virtuous example, as Confucius had written – of ‘Redness’, as it was termed in Jiangxi, and would be again in the Cultural Revolution – was the key to swaying people's minds.¹¹⁶ Where Confucius, however, had contended that the masses ‘may be made to follow a course of action, but they may not be made to understand it’, Mao, as a communist, insisted that ‘the masses are the real heroes’,¹¹⁷ capable themselves of generating revolutionary ideas:

All correct leadership is necessarily ‘from the masses, to the masses’. This means: take the ideas of the masses … [and] through study, turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas, then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and … test [their] correctness in action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses … and so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time.¹¹⁸

In the Rectification Campaign, this approach was applied within the Party's own ranks. The ‘movement of enlightenment’ which Mao sought was to be brought about voluntarily, by Party members themselves: ‘Communist Party members must ask “Why?” about everything, turn matters over deliberately in their minds and ask whether they conform to reality. They certainly must not follow blindly. Nor must they encourage slavishness.’ Yet, at the same time, he insisted on the need for uniformity of thought. ‘Submission to Central leadership’ was specifically reaffirmed.¹¹⁹

Mao's predilection for contradictions of this kind became a hallmark of his political style. It was a fiendishly clever, yet extraordinary simple device, enabling him to modulate the progress of an ideological campaign to accommodate his political needs, to change direction at will, and to lure real or presumed opponents into exposing their views, the better to strike them down.

Rectification had never been intended as a gentle, benign process. It was to be the final struggle, not only against Wang Ming and the ideas he represented, but more broadly against all in the Party who were in any way reluctant to accept the hegemony of Mao's thought. ‘Curing the sickness to save the patient’ was a fine principle, but Mao had not promised it would be painless. ‘The first step’, he had explained, ‘is to give the patient a powerful shock. Yell at him, “You're sick!”. Then he'll get a fright and break out in a sweat. At that point, he can be put on the road to recovery.’¹²⁰ Confucian-style persuasion, moreover, might be the principal method; but, like his imperial predecessors, Mao reserved Legalist coercion for those who refused to submit – not senior leaders like Wang Ming, whose status protected them from crude repression, but lesser, more vulnerable souls, whose plight would serve as a warning to others.

In Yan'an, in 1942, the foremost among these irreductibles was an idealistic young writer named Wang Shiwei.¹²¹

Sincerity, not to say gullibility, has been one of the most attractive and enduring characteristics of Chinese intellectuals through the centuries. Among the writers and artists who had flocked to the communist standard since the beginning of the war, Mao's call for inner-Party debate and the questioning of long-held truths provoked an explosion of wall newspapers – with names like Shiyudi (Arrow and Target), Qing qibing (Light Cavalry), Tuo ling (Camel Bells) and Xibei feng (Northwest Wind) – like that in the May Fourth Movement, twenty years before.

The feminist, Ding Ling, made a vituperative attack on the Party's hypocrisy towards women. Her colleague, the poet, Ai Qing, complained caustically that Mao's cultural commissars expected him ‘to describe ringworm as flowers’. But the most devastating article by far was Wang Shiwei's satirical essay, ‘Wild Lily’, which appeared in the Party newspaper, Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily), in March. It denounced the ‘dark side of Yan'an’ – the ‘three classes of clothing and five grades of food’, which were allocated to senior officials when ‘the sick can't get a bowl of noodles, and the young have only two bowls of congee a day’ the privileged access to young women enjoyed by those who had political power; the elitism and aloofness of cadres towards the rank and file.

Even now, half a century later, Chinese still disagree whether Mao set a deliberate trap, into which Wang Shiwei, and others, fell, or whether the writers’ response took him by surprise.

Typically, he encouraged both interpretations, describing Wang, at one moment, as a sorely needed target for the Rectification Campaign, and, at another, as a distraction, undermining its political purpose.¹²² But whether premeditated or not, Wang's calvary became a model in the repression of intellectual dissent, whose lessons would be applied, almost unchanged, to writers and artists in China throughout Mao's lifetime and beyond.

These were spelled out by Mao himself, in May, at a specially called forum on literature and art. Satire and criticism were necessary, he said, but writers and artists must know on which side of the revolutionary divide they belonged. Those (like Wang Shiwei) who devoted their energies to exposing ‘the so-called “darkness” of the proletariat’ were ‘petty-bourgeois individualists’, ‘mere termites in the revolutionary ranks’. The purpose of art, he went on, was to serve proletarian politics. The ‘fundamental task’ of writers and artists was to become ‘loyal spokesmen’ for the masses, immersing themselves in their lives and extolling their revolutionary struggles.¹²³

Four days later, Wang was subjected to an ideological show trial, a prototype, albeit in milder form, of the struggle meetings of the 1960s. For two weeks, his Party colleagues debated his errors. Mao's political secretary, Chen Boda, set the tone, likening Wang to a leech and referring to him as ‘Comrade Shit-stink’, a word-play on the characters that formed his name. The bold poet, Ai Qing, intoned: ‘His viewpoint is reactionary and his remedies are poisonous; this “individual” does not deserve to be described as “human”, let alone a comrade.’ Even the rebellious Ding Ling decided it was wiser to denounce him. In the logic of rectification, it was not enough for Wang merely to be purged. His fellow writers had publicly to humiliate him. His ‘trial’ marked the beginning of a practice of collective denunciation that would remain an essential part of the Chinese communists’ treatment of dissidents for decades to come.

Afterwards, he was dismissed from the Literary Association, which meant he was no longer allowed to write. ‘Everyone else’, one participant recalled, having ‘got rid of their ideological burden’ – in other words, having saved their own skins – breathed a sigh of relief and resolved to keep their heads down in future.

Mao, however, was not yet convinced that the writers had learned their lesson. Wang himself had refused to recant, maintaining that what he had written had been intended for the Party's good. According to Kang Sheng, 90 per cent of the Yan'an intellectuals had initially sympathised with him. The Rectification Campaign was therefore extended, and efforts to demonise Wang shifted into higher gear. Already, during his ‘trial’, he had been accused of Trotskyism, ‘anti-Party thoughts’, having a ‘filthy and disgusting soul’ and inhabiting the mental universe of ‘a counter-revolutionary shit-hole’. None the less, his case had been treated as that of an erring comrade, who might possibly still be saved. The following October, that changed. Wang was formally accused of being a Guomindang spy, and of leading a Trotskyite ‘Five-Member Anti-Party Gang’ which had ‘sneaked into the Party to destroy and undermine it’. He was subsequently taken into custody by officials of the Social Department, the Party's Security Police, along with some 200 others regarded as politically unreliable, and detained at a secret CCP prison in the hills beyond Zaoyuan.

The ‘Anti-Party Gang’ was a frame-up, pure and simple, of the type at which Kang Sheng came to excel. Wang and the other four alleged members, two young married couples, had known each other slightly and shared the same liberal views. That was as far as the ‘conspiracy’ went. Even Mao, who had approved the operation, tried to shrug it off later as a ‘mistake’. Yet it was no less essential to his strategy than other, subtler aspects of the Rectification Campaign. For it showed the Party at large that the leadership's tolerance went only so far, that those who placed themselves beyond the pale – whose cases, as Mao would later put it, changed from being ‘contradictions among the people’ to ‘contradictions between the enemy and ourselves’ – would find the Confucian velvet glove replaced by a Legalist chopper.

From the autumn of 1942 onwards, Kang Sheng was given carte blanche for the first (but by no means the last) time to demonstrate his prowess as Mao's axeman.

A ‘cadre screening movement’ was launched to weed out ‘spies and bad elements’, on the pretext that the growth of Party membership had allowed Chiang Kai-shek's intelligence services to infiltrate secret agents. ‘Spies’, Mao warned melodramatically, were becoming ‘as thick as fur’, But, as in Wang Shiwei's case, the word ‘spy’ was broadly construed. Voicing dissident opinions, ‘liberalism’ towards unorthodox elements, a lack of enthusiasm for rectification, having relatives who were GMD members – all became grounds for suspicion. In December, therefore, with Mao's approval, the ‘screening movement’ became a ‘rescue movement’, in which suspects were tortured into confessing in order that they might be ‘saved’. This was consistent with Mao's original formula, ‘Cure the sickness to save the patient’, but distorted into a new, savage form that few in the Party had bargained for.

By July 1943, over a thousand ‘enemy agents’ had been detained, of whom nearly half had confessed. Kang reported that 70 per cent of recently recruited Party cadres were politically unreliable. At an army communications school, 170 out of 200 students were charged as ‘special agents’. Even in the Party Secretariat, the hub of Mao's apparatus of power, ten officials out of sixty were found to have ‘political problems’. There were dozens of suicides, and some 40,000 people (5 per cent of the total Party membership) were expelled.

It was all chillingly reminiscent of Mao's campaign against the AB-tuan at Futian in 1930. The death-toll was far lower, but the reliance on torture and confession was essentially the same.

Mao's colleagues thought so, too. Zhou Enlai, who returned to Yan'an from Chongqing in the summer of 1943, challenged Kang's assertions that the underground Party in the White areas was riddled with traitors. That in turn led Ren Bishi to investigate. His report to Mao was never made public, but it was evidently highly critical of Kang's methods, for in August the Chairman started to rein in the Social Department investigators. Two months later he minuted: ‘We should not kill anyone. Most people should not be arrested. This is the policy we must stick to.’ With that, the ‘rescue movement’ ended. In December 1943, a year after the movement had begun, it was revealed that 90 per cent of those accused had been innocent and were being rehabilitated, in some cases posthumously.¹²⁴

Mao's reasons for permitting the ‘rescue movement’ to get so badly out of hand cast a revealing light on his style of rule.

Nationalist pressure was one factor, as it had been at Futian. But far more important was his conviction that a leader should never appear to be soft. In 1943, as he prepared to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, Mao had reached the end of his long apprenticeship in the uses of power. His setbacks in the 1920s and early 1930s had taught him that in politics, as in war, the object was to annihilate one's opponents, not to leave them wounded to fight another day. That did not mean a return to the old, discredited policies of ‘harsh struggle and merciless blows’, which Mao blamed on Wang Ming. But it implied a recognition that persuasion had to be backed up by fear. Revolution was not a dinner-party.

After his arrest, Mao gave orders that he neither be released nor killed. He remained in detention – ‘a young man with a grey, deathly look on his face’, who spoke ‘as if reciting from a textbook’ – to serve as a living warning to others in the Party of the fate that would await them should they stray from Mao's appointed path.

In the spring of 1947, when the communists withdrew from Yan'an, He Long was the local military commander. Westerners usually depicted him as the Robin Hood of the Red Army, a daredevil, romantic figure, who hated the rich and championed the poor. But like his fellow-generals, He Long was a tough, ruthless man. They hated intellectuals like Wang, who whined about literary freedoms while young soldiers were dying at the front. On He's orders one morning, Wang Shiwei was executed, with an axe, in a village near the Yellow River. When Mao was told, he bit his lip but said nothing.

Mao's emergence as the Party's supreme leader was accompanied by a growing personality cult. Already in the late 1920s, the Cantonese-speaking villagers of southern China wove myths about the bandit leader they called Mo Tak Chung, whom the authorities could never kill. But the decision to promote his image nationally as the standard-bearer of Chinese communism had come a decade later with the publication of Edgar Snow's Red Star over China. Snow had written that he perceived in Mao ‘a certain force of destiny’.

Mao evidently felt that, too. In the winter of 1935, he had revealed the full sweep of his ambition in a poem describing the landscape of northern Shensi. It opened with the lines:

A hundred leagues are ice-bound,
A thousand leagues of whirling snow …
The mountains dance like silver snakes,
The highlands roll like white wax elephants challenging the heavens.¹²⁵

Mao then turned his thoughts to the Chinese leaders of antiquity who had gazed before him on this same landscape – the founding Emperors of the Qin, the Han, the Tang and the Song; and Genghis Khan, the Mongol. All had triumphed, he wrote, yet all had been flawed. ‘For true heroes,’ Mao declared, ‘we must look to the present age.’

At a time when the Red Army could muster only a few thousand poorly armed men, Mao already saw himself as the founding figure in a new, communist era, ready to assume the mantle of greatness inherited from the imperial past.

Thus, from the end of the Long March, Mao was predisposed to the idea that he was an exceptional man, ordained to play an exceptional role. From there it was but a small step, once conditions were ripe, to launching a full-blown leadership cult.

In June 1937, the new CCP weekly, Jiefang (Liberation), published his picture for the first time. It was a woodcut, with Mao's face illuminated by the rays of the sun, a motif traditionally associated with emperor-worship in China. Six months later, the first collection of his writings was printed in Shanghai.¹²⁶ In the summer of 1938 another milestone was passed when Mao's faithful acolyte, Lin Biao, wrote of his ‘genius in leadership’,¹²⁷ a phrase that would become so overworked in the later years of Mao's life that even he would grow sick of it.

At the same time, Mao's relations with those around him underwent a subtle change.

Western visitors in the early days of Yan'an had been charmed by the casualness of the place. Mao would drop in unannounced for dinner or a game of cards. ‘There developed’, wrote the Comintern adviser, Otto Braun, ‘what might almost be called a social life.’¹²⁸ Saturday-night dances were held, which Mao – notwithstanding Agnes Smedley's comment that he had ‘no rhythm in his being’¹²⁹ – particularly relished, because of the opportunities they provided for adoring female company. The American communist, Sidney Rittenberg, recalled arriving late one evening.

I could hear a string bass, a couple of fiddles, and maybe a saxophone and a clarinet tooting away … Someone pushed open the door and I peeped inside. There, directly across the room, I saw a lifesized portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong. I recognised immediately the wide forehead and brow, and the tiny, almost feminine mouth. Framed by the doorway, against the whitewashed walls, the leonine head looked stern, almost baleful. The tableau lasted only a split second. Then the band struck up a foxtrot, and the portrait came to life, turned, gestured to his partner, and began gliding across the floor.¹³⁰

Now, behind the façade of easy fellowship – the atmosphere of an American revivalist camp, full of back-slapping and good cheer, as one visitor described it – a new formality developed.

In the spring of 1938, Violet Cressy-Marcks, one of the remarkable generation of intrepid women travellers who spent the inter-war years journeying alone through the Orient, was escorted to Mao's courtyard at Fenghuangshan to find its outer gate guarded by a soldier with a sub-machine-gun, and a second guard, at an inner door, carrying ‘the biggest naked sword I had ever seen in my life’.¹³¹ Gone were the days on the Jinggangshan, or even at Ruijin, less than ten years before, when Mao and the other leaders lived among the peasants. Now a pervasive sense of hierarchy set in. Mao no longer visited others; they came to him.¹³² Later that year, he requisitioned the only vehicle in town, a donated Chevrolet van, emblazoned with the words, ‘Ambulance: Gift of the New York Chinese Laundrymen's National Salvation Association’, to serve as his personal transport. The rest of the Politburo walked.¹³³

Not everyone welcomed the plethora of superlatives – ‘most creative’, ‘most qualified’, ‘most talented’, ‘most authoritative’ – which now attached themselves to Mao. Even Liu Shaoqi, who was among his most consistent supporters, issued a cautious warning. In sinifying Marxism, he wrote, ‘we must not follow blindly, nor worship any idols’.

But in the winter of 1942, came news from Europe which silenced such hesitations. The battle of Stalingrad, the ‘Red Verdun’, as Mao called it, would come to be seen as a turning-point in the war, heralding the eventual collapse of the fascist Axis and bringing closer the time when conflict would resume between the Chinese nationalists and the communists.

That redirected attention, in both camps, to the need to build symbolic capital for the coming contest for the country's allegiance. On March 10, 1943, Chiang Kai-shek published his book, China's Destiny, setting out his claims to be China's ruler. Mao's elevation to become Chairman of the Politburo, and thus the Communist Party's champion, occurred a few days later. The territory and population each controlled was still heavily weighted in Chiang's favour. But the disparity was growing steadily smaller. Chiang's book was made compulsory reading in schools and universities in the White areas. Mao's writings on the sinification of Marxism became the guiding doctrine in the Red areas.¹³⁴

Two months later, Mao's stature was further enhanced when Stalin, in a gesture to the Western allies, dissolved the Comintern. The CCP was now, in theory and in fact, an independent, national party.

As the personal dimension in the two parties’ rivalry became more sharply drawn, the personality cult around Mao reached new heights. In July, Liu Shaoqi, his doubts now stilled, lit the fires of unrestrained adulation. In a hagiographic article, he asserted that the only way to guarantee that the Party would not commit future errors was to ensure that ‘Mao Zedong's leadership penetrates everywhere’.¹³⁵ That was the signal for his Politburo colleagues, from Zhou Enlai and Zhu De down, to join a chorus of delirious approval. Two American journalists, Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby, visiting Yan'an some months later, reported that Mao ‘was set on a pinnacle of adoration’, the object of ‘panegyrics of the most high-flown, almost nauseatingly slavish eloquence’. Even more striking, they wrote, was the practice of Mao's fellow leaders, ‘men of great rank themselves, to make ostentatious notes on Mao's free-running speeches, as though drinking from the fountain of knowledge’.¹³⁶

This was the time when the term ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ (Mao Zedong sixiang) was coined, and when the first versions of his ‘Selected Works’ were compiled. It was then, too, that the Maoist anthem, ‘The East is Red’, was written:

The East is Red, the sun rises.
In China a Mao Zedong is born.
He seeks the people's happiness.
He is the people's Great Saviour.

Mao's portrait was painted on village walls and public buildings all over Red China.¹³⁷ Schools were named after him: the Zedong Young Cadres’ School in Yan'an, the Zedong Youth School in Shandong.¹³⁸ Toddlers were taught to chant: ‘We are all Chairman Mao's good little children’.¹³⁹

The following winter, labour heroes sent messages, hailing Mao as China's ‘star of salvation’, a term which, in Chinese minds, conjured up the ancient link between the Emperor and the Heavens. In the spring of 1944, Mao was invited to plant the first grains of millet, as the Emperor, in past ages, had symbolically ploughed the first furrow.¹⁴⁰

All through Chinese history, the summation of the past had played a crucial part in creating the political basis for a new dynasty's assumption of power. In Mao's case, there was the additional example of Stalin's rule in Russsia. One of the Soviet dictator's first actions after the Great Purge, in which the last of his adversaries perished, had been to issue his own version of Soviet Party history – the History of the CPSU (Bolshevik), Short Course – in 1938. This was translated into Chinese and assigned for cadre study in Yan'an a year later. Subsequently it was included among the texts used in the Rectification Campaign, a message not lost on Mao's colleagues.¹⁴¹

But the ‘clarification of Party history’, as it was delicately called, continued to elude him.

The crux of the problem was that Mao, like Stalin – like Chinese leaders through the ages – would brook no rival source of authority. It was not enough that the Party's early leaders, Chen Duxiu and Li Lisan, were already discredited (and Qu Qiubai, had he not died a martyr, would surely have been, too). It was not enough that the political line of Wang Ming and Bo Gu had been repudiated. The exposure and rebuttal of non-Maoist ideas had to be carried through to the end. There was no lack of precedent for this in China's imperial past. The great Qing Emperor, Qianlong, in the eighteenth century, conducted one of the most terrible literary inquisitions of all time to root out seditious thought. Mao, too, felt instinctively that his rule would not be secure until all the intellectual alternatives within the Party had been closed off, and senior officials, starting with his own closest colleagues, had publicly confessed their past errors in supporting the mistaken policies previously associated with his rivals.

It would take another eighteen months before he was finally satisfied that he had the degree of control that he wanted.

From late 1943 until the spring of 1944, Liu Shaoqi, as Mao's point man, led the attack on the Fourth Plenum, which had brought Wang Ming to power. Everyone who had ever been associated with Wang, starting with Zhang Wentian and Zhou Enlai, made abject self-criticisms – and was criticised by their colleagues in turn.¹⁴²

In Zhou's case, the process was particularly painful. On at least two occasions, Mao himself made blistering attacks on Zhou's record, his lack of principle and willingness to be swayed by whichever group held power. In Jiangxi, Zhou had sided with the Returned Students. After 1937, he had backed Wang Ming. Mao was determined that this time, he should learn his lesson.¹⁴³ Ren Bishi, now one of the Chairman's close allies, was likewise required to repudiate his former ties with Wang Ming. Kang Sheng was criticised for his handling of the ‘rescue movement’, along with lesser figures like Deng Fa (his predecessor as Security Chief, and the architect of the blood-purge in Fujian in 1931). Apart from absent members, such as Wang Jiaxiang (who was back in Moscow) and Wang Ming (who was ill), every leader went through the ritual of repentance and obeisance to Mao's ideas – with one exception: Liu Shaoqi, who in a foretaste of the hubris that would eventually cause his downfall, claimed to have been on Mao's side all along.

In April 1944, with all opposition stilled, Mao was ready to bring the orgy of self-flagellation to an end. Wang Ming and Bo Gu, he announced, would not be punished for anti-Party crimes, as the Russian Old Bolsheviks had been. Party policy veered back towards conciliation again.

Mao also made a tacit apology for the excesses of the ‘rescue movement’, bowing to the assembled cadres as a sign of atonement. It was a measure of the depth of hatred which that campaign had aroused that, despite his Olympian stature in the Part by this stage, he had to bow not once but three times before the audience applauded, signifying that his excuses were accepted.

In the new, authorised version of Party history, Mao's struggles against the ‘wrong views’ of Chen Duxiu, Qu Qiubai, Li Lisan, and Wang Ming, and the triumph of his own correct thinking from 1935 on, were depicted as linked elements of a single, continuous whole. The myth that was so created would resonate well into the 1960s, and for many Chinese, beyond: since Mao had always been right in the past, how could he not be right in the future?

A further year elapsed before the formal ‘Resolution on Certain Questions of Party History’, embodying this principle, was approved by the full Central Committee in April 1945. It had to be revised fourteen times, because almost every senior communist had a personal stake in the interpretation accorded to events in which he had been directly involved. Indeed, so contentious were some of these matters of detail that the debate had to be shifted from the Seventh Congress, where it was originally to have been held, to the preceding plenum, which was smaller and more easily controlled. In the interests of unity, Bo Gu was made a member of the drafting committee (signifying that he endorsed the criticism of his own former policies), and Wang Ming was eventually persuaded also to write a letter, recognising his errors. The same sense of unity restored pervaded the Congress itself. At Mao's insistence, Bo and Wang were both re-elected to the Central Committee, albeit in last and last-but-one place. Li Lisan, denounced for his leftist deviations, absent in the Soviet Union where he had been living in disgrace for the last fifteen years, and unaware that the Congress was even taking place, retained his membership too.

Mao became Chairman of the whole Party, instead of merely the Secretariat and Politburo. Liu Shaoqi was confirmed as his number two and putative heir. Zhou Enlai came third in the rank order, although, in a sign that he was still on probation after the Rectification Campaign, Mao allowed him to be placed well down in the Central Committee listing, in a none too subtle reminder that Zhou held office at the will of the Chairman, not because he had a strong following of his own. Zhu De, the Commander-in-Chief, ranked fourth, and Ren Bishi, fifth.

When the Seventh Congress ended, Mao had finally achieved the fusion of power, ideology and charisma he had been seeking since Zunyi. Over the years, the more perceptive of his visitors had sensed obscurely the changes that were at work. Edgar Snow, in 1939, found him acquiring a sage-like serenity.¹⁴⁴ Evans Carlson noted his air of abstraction.¹⁴⁵ But Sidney Rittenberg put it best, when he contrasted Mao with Zhou Enlai. ‘With Zhou,’ he wrote, ‘I felt I was with … a comrade. With Mao, I felt I was sitting next to history.’¹⁴⁶

By the summer of 1944, the tide of war in Europe was flowing strongly in the Allies’ favour. Italy had capitulated. American- and British-led forces had landed in Normandy. From the east, the once invincible German army was being pushed back towards its own borders by the Russian juggernaut. In Asia, too, Japan was wavering. In China the imperial army had launched the Ichigō offensive, the biggest wartime operation Japan had ever undertaken, to open an overland route to French Indochina. But while superficially a success, the operation was misconceived. Instead of giving Japan a strategic advantage, it weakened Chiang's nationalists, who bore the brunt of the fighting, and allowed the communists to carve out new base areas behind enemy lines as the front moved south.¹⁴⁷ Elsewhere in the Pacific theatre, the Emperor's forces were in retreat.

While the High Command in Tokyo began contemplating the unthinkable, the defence of the home islands, Stalin and Roosevelt turned their attention to the shape of the post-war order to come.

On July 22, 1944, an aircraft with US markings appeared over Yan'an. It caused almost as big a sensation as the arrival of Wang Ming, five-and-a-half years before – not least because as it was coming in to land, the left wheel hit a grave-mound just before the runway, causing it to lurch violently downwards and the left propeller to shear off, which then slammed into the pilot compartment, making a huge hole in the fuselage and bringing the plane to a jarring halt. Thus began the so-called Dixie Mission, America's first and last overt attempt (until the early 1970s) to establish official lines of communication with the Chinese communists.¹⁴⁸ Astonishingly, no one was hurt, and after being greeted by Zhou Enlai, the small group of US liaison officers were escorted to their quarters – where a learning experience started for both sides. The Americans had to be reminded not to bawl ‘Boy!’, whenever they wanted something, but to call politely for their zhaodaiyuan, or ‘hospitality officer’. The Chinese found themselves for the first time in a quasi-diplomatic relationship with a group of non-communist Westerners. Mao set the tone, giving instructions that the words, ‘Our Friends’, be inserted into the Jiefang ribao headline, welcoming the mission. He and the other leaders were invited to showings of Hollywood musicals on a petrol-driven projector, and for a time films like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times displaced the Saturday-night dances as Yan'an's main social attraction.¹⁴⁹

The American decision to send the US Observer Mission, as the group was officially named, reflected Roosevelt's frustration at the inability of the Generalissimo's corrupt, authoritarian and increasingly unpopular regime to prosecute the war effectively. Chiang's failure to halt Ichigō was the latest in a long series of nationalist bungling. The US President wanted a settlement with the communists so that the two sides would join together to drive out the invader.

Stalin, who feared the creation of an American protectorate in China, wanted treaty relations with the nationalist government which would guarantee Chinese neutrality in any future Great Power struggle, and the recognition of Russia's ‘special interests’ in Manchuria, notably railway and port concessions. He, too, though for different reasons, favoured an agreement between the GMD and the communists. The Generalissimo himself was adamantly opposed to negotiations with ‘the Reds’. But, under pressure from both Washington and Moscow, he reluctantly gave in. On November 7, 1944, Roosevelt's personal emissary, Major-General Patrick J. Hurley, set out for Yan'an to begin a mediation effort.¹⁵⁰

Unfortunately, no one had thought to send word ahead that the General was on his way. When the weekly US plane, bringing the Dixie Mission's supplies, arrived from Chongqing, Zhou Enlai, who happened to be at the airstrip, was startled to see emerge ‘a tall, grey-haired, soldierly, extremely handsome man, wearing [a] most beautifully tailored uniform … with enough ribbons on his chest to represent every war, it seemed … in which the United States had ever engaged’. On being told who the distinguished visitor was, Zhou rushed off to find Mao, and an infantry company was mustered to form an improvised guard of honour. But the day's surprises were only beginning. Hurley, an Oklahoma orphan who had become an oil millionaire, was the incarnation of American capitalism, as vain as a peacock, and loved to play to the cameras. As he took the salute, members of the Mission recalled, he ‘drew himself to his full impressive height, swelled up like a poisoned pup, [waved his hat in the air] … and pierced the north China stillness with a blood-curdling whooping “Yahoooo!” of the Choctaw Indians’. Mao and Zhu De gaped in astonished disbelief.¹⁵¹

Hurley's three-day visit turned out to be an object-lesson in the misunderstanding of China which would characterise US policy until Richard Nixon became President, twenty-five years later.

He offered Mao a draft agreement, replete with sonorous phrases about ‘the establishment of a government of the people, for the people and by the people’, which he had composed himself, apparently convinced that, if the communists signed on, Chiang, under American pressure, would have no choice but to do the same. The premise was false. The Generalissimo soon made clear that he was not willing to accept key provisions of Hurley's text – such as the legalisation of the Communist Party, and equal treatment for communist and nationalist forces in the allocation of military supplies – and still less Mao's revised version, which proposed a coalition government. Hurley's blunder was made all the more glaring because he had asserted publicly in Yan'an that he found Mao's counter-proposals ‘fair and just’, and they had both signed the final draft as a gauge of their good faith.

Two weeks later the peace effort stalled. When the Dixie Mission commander, Colonel David Barrett, made a last effort to revive it in December, he was exposed to the full blast of Mao's recriminations:

General Hurley came to Yan'an and asked on what terms we would co-operate with the Guomindang. We offered a five-point proposal … General Hurley agreed that the terms were eminently fair … The Generalissimo has refused these terms. Now the United States comes and earnestly asks us to accept counter-proposals which require us to sacrifice our liberty. This is difficult for us to understand … If … the United States wishes to continue to prop up the rotten shell that is Chiang Kai-shek, that is her privilege … We are not like Chiang Kai-shek. No nation needs to prop us up. We can stand erect and walk on our own feet like free men.¹⁵²

Mao's attitude, Barrett reported, was ‘recalcitrant in the extreme’, and several times he flew into a violent rage. ‘He kept shouting, over and over again, “We will not yield any further!”, “That bastard, Chiang!”, and “If [he] were here I would curse him to his face!” … Zhou Enlai backed up in calm, cold language everything that Chairman Mao said. I left the interview feeling I had talked in vain to two clever, ruthless and determined leaders who felt absolutely sure of the strength of their position.’

That was certainly the impression Mao's histrionics were intended to convey. But Barrett's conclusion did the communists too much credit. At the end of 1944, they had nearly 900,000 troops and controlled territory with a population of 90 million. Chiang Kai-shek had 1.5 million troops, and controlled 200 million people. The Guomindang's forces were ‘still formidable’, Mao warned a few months later, and the Red Army would underestimate them at its peril.¹⁵³

Against this background, General Hurley's peace-making, hamhanded though it was, did Mao an enormous service. It locked Chiang into discussions which further legitimized the communist cause, and which he could not break off without antagonising both his American ally and all those Chinese who supported him on patriotic rather than political grounds.

US mediation also gave Mao an opportunity to finesse the communists’ image abroad by persuading the foreigners who flocked to Yan'an following the Dixie Mission's arrival that the CCP was a moderate party, made up essentially of agrarian reformers, communist in little more than name. That particular hare had been started by Stalin, who, ever since the beginning of the war, had been encouraging him to put ‘communism’ on the back-burner in order to maximise popular support for the united front against Japan.¹⁵⁴ Now the Soviet leader told the US Ambassador, Averill Harriman, that Mao and his colleagues were good patriots but ‘margarine communists’, implying that they were not real Marxist-Leninists (a view which not only fitted well with his efforts to further a CCP–GMD peace accord, but also reflected real doubts about Mao's doctrinal orthodoxy).¹⁵⁵ It was consonant, too, with Mao's ‘New Democracy’ platform, which stated that the CCP's immediate goal was not Soviet-style communism, but a mixed economy. After the Hurley exchanges, this ‘campaign of moderation’ went into high gear, and took on a strongly pro-American slant. Mao wondered aloud whether ‘it might be more appropriate to call ourselves a Democratic Party’, dropping the word ‘communist’ altogether. He opined that the United States was ‘the most suitable country’ to aid China's modernisation, and startled an American reporter by asking if he thought Sears Roebuck would like to extend its mail order business to China.¹⁵⁶

All this was wholly disingenuous. But it made effective propaganda. By January 1945, the communists were making secret overtures to the State Department, proposing that Mao and Zhou visit Washington for talks with Roosevelt.¹⁵⁷ Chiang's claim to be the only Chinese leader any self-respecting Western government could support suddenly began to look frayed. Mao allowed himself to hope that the United States might perhaps stay neutral in the communist-nationalist conflict which, following the failure of Hurley's mission, he was convinced must eventually resume.

Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to treat Chiang's regime as a buffer, separating a US-dominated Pacific from a Soviet-dominated North East Asia. Russia would recover the Kurile islands and southern Sakhalin. The United States and Britain acknowledged that Russia had special though not exclusive privileges in Manchuria, and promised not to oppose the ‘independence’ of Outer Mongolia, which would make that country, over which China still claimed sovereignty, to all intents and purposes a Soviet satellite. In return, Stalin undertook to declare war on Japan within ninety days of the end of hostilities in Europe, and not to support the CCP against the nationalist government.

Having settled the future shape of Asia to their mutual satisfaction, Washington and Moscow began pressing their respective Chinese clients to accept some form of coalition government.¹⁵⁸

Mao apeared to acquiesce, setting out a comprehensive strategy for an alternative, peaceful route to power in his report to the Seventh Congress. But his scepticism was all too apparent. In a whimsical, off-the-cuff speech to delegates later the same day, he likened Chiang – whom he described as a ‘hooligan’ – to a man with a dirty face. ‘Our policy has been and still is’, he declared, ‘to invite him to wash his face [in other words, to reform] and not to cut off his head … [But] the older one gets, the less willing and likely one is to change one's ways. [So] we say, “if you wash, we can marry, for we still love each other dearly” … But we must keep up our defences. When attacked … we must resolutely, quickly, thoroughly and completely eliminate the enemy.’¹⁵⁹

To that end, the Congress called for the expansion of the Red Army to one million men; preparations for urban insurrections; and increased emphasis on mobile warfare, rather than guerrilla tactics. In coded cables to the military commanders, Mao warned that renewed civil war was inevitable. They must use the time remaining to make the necessary dispositions.¹⁶⁰

As far as it went, this made sense. But Mao, like Chiang Kai-shek, unaware that America would use the atom bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had misjudged the speed of the Japanese collapse. Well into the summer of 1945, he continued to believe that Japan's defeat was at least a year away. The plan to switch from guerrilla to conventional warfare was too little, too late.

On August 9, the Soviet army, as Stalin had promised, invaded Manchuria (the Soviet leader having brought things forward lest Japan surrender too quickly and Russia no longer have a reason to declare war). At Yan'an the news was received rapturously. The following day, Zhu De told communist troops to start accepting the surrender of Japanese units. However, Chiang then issued a counter-order to Japanese commanders to surrender only to nationalist forces. Mao cabled Stalin for support. Four days later the Soviet leader dropped his bombshell. On August 14 in Moscow, only hours before Japan's capitulation, Chiang's Foreign Minister, Wang Shijie, and Vyacheslav Molotov signed a treaty of friendship and alliance. Chiang had been forced to accept the concessions on Manchuria and Outer Mongolia which Roosevelt and Stalin had agreed in his absence at Yalta. In return, the Soviet Union affirmed Chinese sovereignty in the north-east and in Xinjiang; promised that areas liberated by Soviet troops would be handed over to nationalist, not communist, forces; and, most important of all, recognised the nationalists’ claim to be China's sole legitimate national government.¹⁶¹

The same day Chiang Kai-shek sent a telegram to Mao, inviting him to ‘honour [us] with your presence for mutual discussions’ following ‘the surrender of the [Japanese] dwarf pirates’.¹⁶² When the CCP Central Committee set conditions which it knew Chiang would not accept, Stalin intervened again, impressing on Mao, in telegrams on August 20 and 22 that a civil war at this stage would be disastrous.^VII The Russians, he said, could do nothing to help their Chinese comrades because their hands were tied by their treaty obligations (which, he added, they had to honour lest the related parts of the Yalta agreement, dealing with Outer Mongolia, Sakhalin and the Kuriles, also be called into question). Negotiation was therefore the only possible course.¹⁶³

To Mao, it was a repetition of Stalin's perfidy in 1936, when he had demanded that the Chinese communists obtain a peaceful resolution of the Xian Incident, and of the pressure the Russians had exerted to preserve the united front after the South Anhui incident. But this time it was even more flagrant. The Soviet leader had sold the CCP down the river for Russia's national interests without even bothering to pretend that there was any larger justification.¹⁶⁴ Mao had known that the Russians and the GMD were talking since June. But he had been kept in the dark about the understanding Stalin had reached at Yalta. Now, finally, it all became clear: if civil war did break out, the CCP would be on its own.

Communist policy changed overnight. All criticism of the Guomindang, and of the United States, stopped. Plans for urban insurrections were put on hold. Red Army units were told to co-operate with US forces in China in disarming Japanese formations. On August 28, Mao set out for Chongqing aboard a US air force plane, accompanied by General Hurley, for peace negotiations, leaving Liu Shaoqi in charge of the Party in his absence. Pyotr Vlasov, the Comintern agent who had replaced Otto Braun and had stayed on in Yan'an after the organisation's dissolution, said afterwards that Mao looked like a man going to his own crucifixion.¹⁶⁵

He was in an unenviable position. Chiang's relations with the United States had improved markedly over the previous nine months. Roosevelt had died, to be succeeded by Harry Truman, and the nationalists now enjoyed the Soviet Union's benevolent neutrality. As long as the talks lasted, the GMD armies, with American support, could move to repossess Japanese-held areas while the Red Army was kept at arm's length. If they broke down, Chiang could blame communist intransigence and opt for a military solution.

The balance of forces was not entirely one-sided. By agreeing, under American pressure, to negotiate face to face, Chiang had been forced to concede, as Mao put it, ‘a pattern of equality’ between the two parties, which the communists saw as a significant gain. The two men had last met in Canton, when Mao had headed the GMD's Peasant Training Institute, nineteen years before. Nothing had happened since to facilitate a meeting of minds. Their personalities were utterly different: contemporary photographs showed Mao in a baggy blue suit with a round Sun Yat-sen collar and an incongruous, light-grey pith helmet over his long, unkempt hair, while Generalissimo Chiang, immaculately groomed, wore a crisply pressed military uniform.¹⁶⁶ Their politics were diametrically opposed. And, for good measure, they detested each other. Mao, Chiang fumed, was a traitor: if such people went unpunished, no one would obey the government.¹⁶⁷

During the six weeks the talks lasted, the two men met four times; approved a memorandum of understanding, in which they both promised ‘resolutely to avoid civil war’; and Chiang undertook to convene an all-party Political Consultative Conference to discuss a new constitution. Wider agreement was blocked, as in earlier negotiations, by Chiang's insistence, and Mao's refusal, that the CCP place its army and the local governments it led under GMD control as a precondition to an overall settlement.¹⁶⁸

In August, when the Chongqing talks began, the US and the Soviet Union were both officially committed to non-intervention in Chinese affairs. By October, when they ended, their relations were fraying. Fifty thousand US marines had started landing on the North China coast, ostensibly to help disarm the Japanese but actually to occupy Beijing, Tianjin and other major cities on the Guomindang's behalf, in order to forestall a Russian move south; while Soviet troops were discreetly conniving in a Chinese communist take-over of Manchuria. Eight months after Yalta, the idea of a neutral China, buffering Soviet and US ambitions, had begun to lose its meaning. The Cold War, conceived in Europe, was rapidly spreading east.

On November 14, nationalist troops, transported to the north by US warships, attacked communist units defending Shanhaiguan, the strategic chokepoint at the end of the Great Wall which controls the main land-route north. Six days later, Lin Biao reported that the town was lost and could not be recaptured. The situation was back where it had been in the summer. Both sides were moving inexorably towards full-scale civil war.

Stalin blew hot and cold. On the one hand, he had serious doubts about the Chinese communists’ ability to defeat Chiang militarily (just as Truman, in an eerie symmetry, believed that Chiang could not defeat the communists). On the other, they gave him leverage against the nationalist regime. In October he had authorised his commanders to provide Lin's troops with Japanese weapons and limited Soviet supplies. But the following month, concerned that tensions with the Americans were getting out of hand, he ordered them to tell the Chinese communists to withdraw from all major cities and communications routes within a week and regroup in the rural areas. ‘If you do not leave,’ one Soviet general warned the north China leader, Peng Zhen, ‘we will use tanks to drive you out.’ Communist sappers, who were sabotaging the railway lines to slow the nationalist advance, were told to desist or be forcibly disarmed. Peng, normally the most unemotional of men, exploded: ‘The army of one Communist Party using tanks to drive out the army of another! Things like this have never happened before.’ Yet there was nothing the Chinese Party could do about it. As in August, they had to acquiesce.

For the first time since 1924, when he had retreated in despair to Shaoshan, Mao's political touch had deserted him. He could not see how to go forward.

Having that summer achieved total power and almost godlike status in a Party which was freer than ever of Soviet control, he suddenly found that he was, after all, impotent – bound hand and foot by the overriding interests of the Great Powers. Stalin's treaty with Chiang in August had prevented him from launching the full-scale civil war, for which, psychologically, he had been preparing, and it had left him politically naked, to face the Generalissimo in Chongqing. The communist leaders were condemned to watch helplessly as Chiang tightened his grip on larger and larger areas of China and the combined pressure of Moscow and Washington prevented them from doing anything effective to stop him. In the summer of 1945, the nationalists had controlled less than 15 per cent of China's territory. A year later they had almost 80 per cent.¹⁷⁰

While Mao languished in the grip of depression, Liu Shaoqi continued to stand in for him as acting head of the Central Committee. Visitors were told he was suffering from exhaustion.¹⁷¹ ‘All through November,’ his interpreter, Shi Zhe, remembered, ‘we saw him, day after day, prostrate on his bed, his body trembling. His hands and legs twitched convulsively, and he was bathed in a cold sweat … He asked us for cold towels to put on his forehead, but it didn't help. The doctors could do nothing.’¹⁷²

Anxieties had been growing in the US Congress over the spectacle of American marines being sucked into a foreign civil war. On November 27, Hurley resigned in a huff after a Congressional resolution urged a US withdrawal. Truman made clear he had no intention of allowing US troops to fight on the nationalist side and announced the appointment of General George C. Marshall, the architect of the lend-lease programme for Europe, to take Hurley's place. The new policy Marshall was to follow had two cardinal objectives: a truce between the nationalists and the communists, leading to a political settlement; and getting the Russians out of Manchuria.¹⁷³

When the news reached Yan'an, Mao saw for the first time in months a glimmer of hope. If the Americans wanted peace in China, they would have to pressure Chiang into halting his offensive against communist positions.¹⁷⁴

Marshall arrived in Chongqing on December 21. Within ten days, he had persuaded both sides to table truce proposals. Zhou Enlai, on Mao's instructions, accepted the nationalists’ principal condition: freedom of movement for government troops to take over Soviet-held areas in Manchuria and to disarm Japanese forces in the south. On January 10, 1946, a ceasefire was signed, which took effect three days later. Meanwhile, in a further gesture to Marshall, Chiang Kai-shek summoned the Political Consultative Conference (PCC), which he had agreed to set up the previous October but had not yet permitted to meet. He intended it as a fig-leaf, to give the government an aura of democratic legitimacy. Instead, an unlikely coalition of communists, third-party figures and GMD moderates took matters out of Chiang's hands, and, building on the momentum generated by the ceasefire accord, approved resolutions calling for, among other things, an elected national assembly and communist participation in a coalition government, in which the GMD would not be permitted to hold more than half of the ministerial posts.¹⁷⁵

Mao was ecstatic. His instincts about the Marshall mission had turned out to be correct. The pendulum had swung back from war to political struggle. ‘Our Party will soon join the government,’ he proclaimed, in a directive at the beginning of February 1946. ‘Generally speaking’, the armed struggle was over. The major task now, Mao asserted, was to overcome closed-doorism, which led ‘some comrades’ to doubt that ‘a new era of peace and democracy has arrived’.¹⁷⁶

That night, he gave a banquet for a visiting American journalist, John Roderick of the Associated Press, the first foreign reporter he had seen for several months. It was a festive occasion, and Mao was full of praise for Truman, whose initiative, he said, had made a major contribution to Chinese–American friendship. Roderick was struck by the way he dominated his surroundings, carrying himself with ‘an air of self-confidence and authority just short of arrogance’. He was the kind of man, Roderick thought, who would stand out in a crowded room anywhere, exuding an aura of leadership like that ‘which must have emanated from men like Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Lenin’.¹⁷⁷

Sadly for this heroic image, the closed-doorists proved correct. Chiang Kai-shek was not ready to carry out the PCC resolutions, and the United States was not ready to force him to do so. Mao had made a massive misjudgement.

For a few weeks more, the impetus Marshall had created kept the negotiations moving forward. In late February, the two sides astonished themselves by reaching agreement on the integration of communist forces into a new, non-partisan national army – an issue which, even at the height of the wartime united front, had proved intractable.¹⁷⁸

But soon there were alarming signs that the peace process was starting to unravel.

At the beginning of March, Winston Churchill gave his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri. Global tensions between the US and the Soviet Union were rising. As American pressure grew for the Soviet army to withdraw from Manchuria, Stalin increased support for the Chinese communists. On March 13, as the Russian pull-out began, Soviet units handed over their positions to Lin Biao's forces, allowing them to consolidate their control of the one major area of China which, because of the Soviet occupation, the nationalists had not been able to take back. Chiang convinced the White House that, ceasefire or no ceasefire, it was imperative that the government intervene lest the whole of Manchuria fall under the communists’ sway. Mao initially interpreted the nationalist troop movements as the Generalissimo trying to strengthen his negotiating position. But when the advance continued, he was forced to recognise that Chiang was serious. A week later, he instructed Lin Biao to launch a counter-offensive, regardless of the effect on the peace talks. Changchun fell to Lin's forces on April 18; Harbin, ten days later.¹⁷⁹

The battle for Manchuria was underway, but not yet a general conflict. For another month, Mao continued to urge communist commanders in other areas to hold their fire unless the nationalists attacked first.

‘The GMD is actively preparing to start a nationwide civil war,’ he wrote in a CC directive on May 15, ‘but the US is not in favour of it … Our Party?s policy should [therefore] be … to prevent, or at least postpone, it.’¹⁸⁰ Three weeks later, Marshall forced Chiang to accept a new ceasefire in Manchuria, but not before his troops had clawed back most of the communists’ gains. Mao agreed to give the negotiations one last chance. They soon collapsed again. Marshall's mediation effort had been a failure, the Central Committee declared. The ‘GMD reactionaries’ were ruling China by terror, and the United States was supporting them. Marshall himself was frustrated and disillusioned by what he called the nationalists’ ‘rottenness and corruption’.¹⁸¹

At the end of June, fresh clashes broke out as the nationalists attacked communist base areas in the Yangtse Valley and in Hebei and Shandong. A month later the fighting spread to engulf the whole of central and northern China.¹⁸²

His leadership was intact. To the Party at large, and to the peasantry who made up the bulk of its following, he was still the ‘star of salvation’, the Red Sun in the East. His colleagues might grumble, out of earshot, over the bewildering zigzags in policy – from war to peace, and back to war again – but no one challenged him. Mao had become indispensable, the irreplaceable guide and symbol of the future of the communist cause.¹⁸³

But his inexperience in dealing with the Powers, which led him to make mistake after mistake the previous autumn and spring, had left him mortified.

Chiang Kai-shek, who headed a recognised government, had had fifteen years to learn how to play them off against each other, and even he did not do it very well. Mao led a rebel movement. He had never met a foreign leader, not even from his closest ally, the Soviet Union. Until the arrival of the Dixie Mission, eighteen months before, he had never dealt with a Western official. His naivety in believing that the Americans would force the nationalist government to compromise still rankled, twenty years later,¹⁸⁴ and was among the reasons for his caution in contacts with the Western powers when the question of diplomatic relations arose after Chiang's defeat.

Once the foreign-policy fog had cleared, the Soviet withdrawal was complete and the focus of Great Power rivalry switched to Europe, Mao's old sureness of touch returned. Facing an enemy he knew well – the Guomindang – on terrain he knew well – the Chinese countryside – he was back in his element. In a succession of Central Committee directives, he reiterated the old, tried and tested battle principles which had worked so well in Jiangxi and against the Japanese – luring the enemy in deep, and concentrating strong forces against weak ones. Abandoning territory to preserve troop-strength was ‘not only unavoidable but necessary’, he told his colleagues that summer, ‘otherwise final victory will be impossible’.¹⁸⁵ Almost alone among the leadership, Mao was convinced that the tide would turn and that China's fate would be decided not by political means but militarily. He told Zhou Enlai that winter that it might take another year, perhaps even a little longer, before the CCP could go on the offensive. A protracted war would follow, he said, but the Red Army – or as it was now called, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) – would win.¹⁸⁶

Next spring, when Yan'an itself was threatened, his interpreter, Shi Zhe, asked him despondently what they could do to stop the town falling. Mao burst out laughing. ‘That's not clever,’ he said. ‘We should not try to stop them … Chiang thinks when he has seized the devils’ lair, he will win. In fact, he will lose everything. [It is written in the Analects:] “If a thing comes to me, and I give nothing in return, that is contrary to propriety.” We will give Chiang Yan'an. He will give us China.’¹⁸⁷

Two weeks later, at dusk on March 18, 1947, the column escorting Mao and other Central Committee leaders left the Red capital, heading north. The Yan'an interlude was over. The final battle had begun.¹⁸⁸

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Plate 17 Yan’an in the late 1930s, with its distinctive Song dynasty pagoda.

Plate 18 Zhang Guotao, whose challenge to Mao collapsed after the destruction of the Fourth Army in Gansu in 1937.

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Plate 19 Wang Shiwei, the gifted young writer whose persecution in the Yan’an Rectification Campaign set the pattern for all Mao’s subsequent efforts to crush intellectual dissent.

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Plate 20 Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, as an actress in Shanghai.

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Plate 21 From left: Zhou Enlai, Mao and Zhu De, in Yan’an in 1946.

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Plate 22 Mao reviewing Lin Biao’s victorious army after the surrender of Beijing in March 1949.

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Plate 23 A landlord in North China, on trial before fellow villagers during the land reform after the communist takeover.

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Plate 24 Mao proclaiming the People’s Republic from Tiananmen on October 1, 1949.

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Plate 25 Gao Gang, Party boss of Manchuria, purged in 1954.

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Plate 26 From left: Mao, Bulganin, Stalin and the East German Party chief, Walter Ulbricht, celebrating the Soviet leader’s 70th birthday at the Kremlin in December 1949.

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Plate 27 Mao relaxing with his nephew, Yuanxin, and his daughters Li Min and Li Na at Lushan in 1951.

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Plate 28 From left: Jiang Qing; Li Na; Mao; his oldest son, Anying, soon to die in Korea; and Anying’s wife, Liu Songlin.

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Plate 29 Mao with the Dalai Lama (right) and the Panchen Lama in Beijing in 1954.

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Plate 30 A struggle meeting to criticise bourgeois intellectuals at the start of the anti-Rightist campaign in July 1957.

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Plate 31 The parting of the ways: Mao and Khrushchev meet for the last time in Beijing in October 1959.

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Plate 32 Peng Dehuai (second from left) talking to peasants in Hunan during the Great Leap Forward in 1959.

I Mao was referring here to weiqi, or Chinese chess, in which the object is to safeguard one's own pieces by maintaining blank spaces on the board into which an adversary's pieces cannot penetrate. So long as a player dominates these blank spaces, his pieces cannot be captured even if they are surrounded.

II These turned out to be prophetic words. Six months later, in December 1938, Wang Jingwei, Mao's former patron and Chiang Kai-shek's onetime rival to inherit Sun Yat-sen's mantle, broke with the GMD and fled to Hanoi. The following spring, he set up a puppet government, based in Nanjing, and afterwards signed a treaty of alliance with Japan.

III This begs the question of whether Mao and Lily Wu were in fact having an affair. The evidence is inconclusive. In her diary, Helen Snow described Lily ‘leaning on Mao's knee in a familiar way’. Agnes Smedley let slip that the actress had been giving Mao ‘mandarin lessons’. He Zizhen, while never formally accusing Mao of adultery, charged Ms Wu with ‘alienating Mao's affections’.

IV Anying and his younger brother, Anqing, had been sent to Moscow in 1936 after the reconstituted Shanghai Party organisation managed to resume contact with them. There Anqing, then aged thirteen, was diagnosed as mentally ill. Li Min joined her mother in Moscow in 1941. Anying returned to China in December 1945, followed by Li Min; Anqing came back with He Zishen eighteen months later.

V Despite Soviet aid, the economy of the Border Region was in crisis from 1941 to 1943. In each of those years the price of millet, the staple foodstuff, increased by between 50 and 130 per cent. Contrary to communist legend, which held that Yan'an had prospered by adopting policies of self-sufficiency and ‘reliance on the masses’, Mao resorted to the same methods that the First Front Army had used to survive after abandoning Jinggangshan: trade in opium. It was referred to in communist documents as ‘special product’, ‘a certain thing’ or simply, ‘soap’, and was not sold in the communist controlled areas, where opium smoking was strictly prohibited, but smuggled out to Japanese-occupied or nationalist-ruled regions. From 1942 to 1945 these exports brought in roughly 40 per cent of the Border Region's revenue. Both the nationalists and the warlords also relied on opium sales to augment their revenue.

VI The Big Three (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin) met at the Crimean resort of Yalta in February 1945, to define the shape of post-war Europe and to delineate their respective spheres of influence in Asia.

VII Three years later, in a rare admission of error, Stalin acknowledged to a group of Bulgarian and Yugoslav leaders that discouraging the Chinese communists from launching the civil war after Japan's defeat had been a mistake. ‘We told them bluntly that we considered the development of the uprising in China had no prospects, that the Chinese comrades should join the government of Chiang Kai-shek and dissolve their army … Now … we admit we were wrong’.