Mao: The Unknown Story

Luckily for Mao, the Nationalist Party did not require such high standards of theoretical correctness. In February 1926 his patron Wang Ching-wei appointed him a founding member of the Nationalists’ Peasant Movement Committee, as well as the head of the Peasant Movement Training Institute, set up two years before with Russian funds.

It was only now, when he was thirty-two, that Mao — assumed by many to this day to have been the champion of the poor peasants — took any interest in their affairs. Under Mao, the Peasant Institute churned out agitators who went into the villages, roused the poor against the rich, and organized them into “peasant associations.” In Hunan they were particularly successful after July, when the Nationalist army occupied the province. The Nationalists had just begun a march north from Canton (known as “the Northern Expedition”) to overthrow the Peking government. Hunan was the first place on the 2,000-kilometer route.

The Nationalist army was accompanied by Russian advisers. The Russians had also just opened a consulate in Changsha, and the KGB station there had the second-largest budget of any of the fourteen stations in China after Shanghai. An American missionary wrote home later that year from Changsha: “We have a Russian Consul [now]. No Russian interests here at all to represent … it is plain … what he is up to … China may pay high for his genial presence …” With close Russian supervision, the new Nationalist authorities in Hunan gave peasant associations their blessing — and funding — and by the end of the year the associations had sprung up in much of the countryside in this province of 30 million people. The social order was turned upside down.

At this time, warlords had been fighting sporadic wars for ten years, and there had been more than forty changes of the central government since the country had become a republic in 1912. But the warlords had always made sure that the social structure was preserved, and life went on as usual for civilians, as long as they were not caught in the crossfire. Now, because the Nationalists were following Russian instructions aimed at bringing about a Soviet-style revolution, social order broke down for the first time.

Violence erupted as poor peasants helped themselves to the food and money of the relatively rich, and took revenge. Thugs and sadists also indulged themselves. By December there was mayhem in the Hunan countryside. In his capacity as a leader of the peasant movement, Mao was invited back to his home province to give guidance.

CHANGSHA, WHEN MAO returned, was a changed city, with victims being paraded around in dunce’s hats (a European invention) as a sign of humiliation. Children scampered around singing “Down with the [imperialist] powers and eliminate the warlords,” the anthem of the Nationalist Revolution, sung to the tune of “Frère Jacques.”

On 20 December 1926 about 300 people crowded the Changsha slide-show theater to listen to Mao, who shared the stage with a Russian agitator called Boris Freyer. (Like virtually every Russian agent in China at this time, he later disappeared in Stalin’s purges.) Mao was no orator; his speech was two hours long, and flat. But it was moderate. “It is not the time yet to overthrow landlords,” he said. “We must make some concessions to them.” At the present stage, “we should only reduce rents and interest rates, and increase the wages of hired hands.” Quoting Mao as saying “we are not preparing to take the land immediately,” Freyer told the Russians’ control body, the Far Eastern Bureau, that Mao’s speech was basically “fine,” but inclined towards being too moderate.

Though Mao did not address the issue of violence, his general approach was not militant. Shortly afterwards he went off on an inspection tour of the Hunan countryside. By the end of the tour, which lasted thirty-two days, he had undergone a dramatic change. Mao himself was to say that before this trip he had been taking a moderate line, and “not until I stayed in Hunan for over thirty days did I completely change my attitude.” What really happened was that Mao discovered in himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery. This gut enjoyment, which verged on sadism, meshed with, but preceded, his affinity for Leninist violence. Mao did not come to violence via theory. The propensity sprang from his character, and was to have a profound impact on his future methods of rule.