Mao: The Unknown Story

AFTER CHIANG KAI-SHEK established a Nationalist government based at Nanjing in 1928, with nominal authority over the whole of China, he launched a drive to weld the many different armies controlled by provincial potentates into a unified national army under his control. This met ferocious resistance from an alliance of warlords, and by the beginning of 1930 each side had deployed hundreds of thousands of troops. The resulting internecine fighting presented the CCP with a chance to expand its own army and bases.

Moscow began to consider forming a Communist state in China. Chou En-lai set off for the Soviet Union in March 1930, bringing with him a detailed report on the Chinese Red Army, saying it had some 62,700 men, made up of 13 armed groups (called “armies”) spread over 8 provinces. The Zhu — Mao Army was the best-known of these, and accounted for almost one-quarter of the total, having expanded to nearly 15,000 men, thanks to its control of a large base. Bases were the key to expanding the army, as possession of a base enabled the Reds to acquire conscripts.

While Chou En-lai was away, the man in charge in Shanghai was Mao’s fellow Hunanese and former subordinate, Li Li-san. Li-san, who had made his name as a labor organizer, was an impulsive activist and passionate advocate of further expansion. Under him, a highly ambitious plan was devised to seize a large chunk of the interior, including big cities like Nanchang and Changsha, and form a Red government in the heart of China, at Wuhan, on the Yangtze. Mao was assigned to take Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi.

Mao was a realist. He knew that even given the infighting among the Nationalists, the Red Army had no hope of seizing and holding major cities. At first he expressed reluctance to carry out the plan, but within days of voicing doubts he was bursting with zeal. He still had no faith in the project, but he realized that he could exploit Shanghai’s fantasy for his own purpose, which was to take over the second biggest Red Army branch, run by Peng De-huai.

PENG, WHO WAS five years Mao’s junior, was born in a village in Mao’s own district in Hunan. He was to rise to be Communist China’s first defense minister, and also Mao’s fiercest and bravest critic within the regime — for which he would pay with a long-drawn-out and agonizing death.

Peng had a highly expressive mouth and eyes, which seemed to show a permanent sadness. He cared about the poor and the downtrodden. Unlike most Communist leaders, he had had a poverty-stricken childhood, which scarred him profoundly. When his mother died, his youngest brother, who was six months old, had starved to death. Decades later, Peng wrote of his childhood:

In bitter winter, when other people were wearing padded clothes and shoes, my brothers and I wore straw sandals on bare feet, and clothes made of palm leaves, like primitive men … When I was ten, there was nothing at all to live on. On New Year’s Day, when rich people’s homes let off firecrackers, my family had not a grain of rice. So I took my second brother to go begging, for the first time.

He described how he fainted from hunger after they got home. Out of pride, he refused to go begging next day, so his grandmother, who was over seventy, went hobbling on bound feet, pulling along his younger brothers, one of them only three years old. Watching them disappear into the snow, Peng said later that he felt sharp knives were cutting at his heart, and he went into the mountains and chopped some firewood which he sold for a small packet of salt. That evening he would not eat the rice his grandmother’s begging had brought home, and the whole family wept.

When he was fifteen, his village was hit by drought, which brought starvation for many. Peng became involved in an attempt to force a wealthy landlord to hand out some rice, by climbing onto the roof of the landlord’s granary and removing the tiles to reveal the grain the man had denied having stored. Peng was placed on a wanted list, and had to flee. In 1916 he joined the Hunan army and became an officer. He was sometimes invited by local dignitaries to banquets where young girls barely in their teens were available for their pleasure. One girl of thirteen told Peng she had been badly beaten by a pimp because she declined to sleep with officers. Peng bought her freedom, and thereafter turned down all invitations to banquets. He became attracted to communism “to find a way out for the poor,” as he put it.

Peng secretly joined the CCP just after New Year 1928. That July he mutinied against the Nationalists, taking 800 men with him. The Party told him to make contact with Mao, who was in the outlaw land nearby at the time. Peng arrived in December, just as Mao was making ready to quit the base. Mao needed someone to stay behind to hold the fort, as possession of a base was his main asset.