Mao: The Unknown Story

For the first time, Mao had to risk his neck. During the arrest scare two years before, he had had time to summon a sedan chair and make off in leisurely fashion to Changsha. But now escape was not so simple. There was no obvious safe haven and the killing of Communists had started. Professor Chen’s eldest son was arrested and beheaded on 4 July. By the end of the year, after the Communists had launched violent uprisings of their own and taken many lives, tens of thousands of Communists and suspects were slaughtered. Anyone could be arrested, and killed, simply on the charge of being a Communist. Many died proclaiming their faith, some shouting slogans, others singing the “Internationale.” Newspapers hailed executions with pitiless headlines.

Mao first had to ensure his personal safety. Then he decided to use the CCP and the Russians for his own ends. This decision, taken in summer 1927, when he was thirty-three, marked Mao’s political coming of age.

PART TWO. LONG MARCH TO SUPREMACY IN THE PARTY

5. HIJACKING A RED FORCE AND TAKING OVER BANDIT LAND (1927–28 AGE 33–34)

AT THE TIME Chiang Kai-shek broke with the Communists in April 1927, Stalin had emerged as the No. 1 in the Kremlin and was personally dictating policy on China. His reaction to Chiang’s split was to order the CCP to form its own army without delay and occupy territory, with the long-term aim of conquering China with the gun.

The military option — the use of force to bring the Chinese Communists to power — had been Moscow’s favored approach ever since the Comintern was founded in 1919. As long as the Nationalists were in play, Moscow’s strategy had been for CCP members to infiltrate and subvert the Nationalist armed forces. Once the break came, Stalin ordered the Communists to pull out those units they were able to control, and “form some new corps.”

Stalin sent a trusted fellow Georgian, Beso Lominadze, to China. Jan Berzin, the head of Russian military intelligence, the GRU, wrote to the commissar for war, Kliment Voroshilov, who chaired the China Commission in Moscow, that Russia’s top priority in China now was to establish a Red army. A huge secret military advice and support system for the Chinese Communists was set up in Russia. The GRU had men in all the main Chinese cities, providing arms, funds and medicine, in addition to intelligence that was often critical to the CCP’s survival. Moscow also sent top-level advisers to China to guide the Party’s military operations, while greatly expanding military training for CCP cadres in Russia.

The immediate plan, devised in Moscow, was for the Communist units pulled out of the Nationalist army to move to the south coast to collect arms shipped in from Russia, and set up a base. At the same time, peasant uprisings were ordered in Hunan and three adjacent provinces where there had been militant peasant organizations, with the goal of taking power in these regions.

Mao agreed with the military approach. On 7 August 1927 he told an emergency Party meeting presided over by Lominadze: “power comes out of the barrel of the gun” (a saying that later acquired international fame). But within this broad design, Mao harbored his own agenda — to command both the gun and the Party. His plan was to build his own army, carve out his own territory, and deal with Moscow and Shanghai from a position of strength. To have his own fiefdom would safeguard his physical survival. He would of course remain in the Party, as its association with Russia was his only chance of achieving anything more than being a mere bandit.

At this time, Professor Chen had just been dismissed as Party chief by Lominadze, and made the scapegoat for the Nationalist split. His replacement was a younger man called Chu Chiu-pai, whose main qualification was his closeness to the Russians. Mao was now promoted, from the Central Committee to the Politburo, though still as a second-level member.

It was now that Mao embarked on a series of steps that would take him to the top of the Communist ladder in the space of four years. As of summer 1927, he had no armed men at his service, and held no military command, so he set out to acquire an armed force by taking over troops that other Communists had built up.

AT THE TIME, the main force the Reds were able to pull out of the Nationalist army consisted of 20,000 troops stationed in and around Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province, about 250 km southeast of Wuhan and 300 km east of Changsha. These troops had nothing to do with Mao. On 1 August they mutinied, on Moscow’s instructions. The main organizer of the mutiny was Chou En-lai, the Party man designated to run the military, with immediate supervision from a Russian military adviser, Kumanin. They then headed straight for Swatow (Shantou) on the coast, 600 km to the south, where the Russians were supposed to ship in arms.