Mao: The Unknown Story

Chiang continued to be consumed by anxiety about what might happen to his son, and his anguish and bitterness almost certainly explain an event that happened thousands of kilometers away. At exactly this time, December 1931, Shao Li-tzu’s son was found shot dead in Rome. This son had been taken by Shao to Russia in 1925 as Ching-kuo’s traveling companion. But, unlike Ching-kuo, Shao junior was later allowed to return to China. The Italian press covered this death as a lovers’ tragedy, one paper running the story under the headline “The tragic end of a Chinese who had wounded his lover”—a woman reported as Czech. But Shao and his family were convinced that the murder of his son, which has been covered up by both Nationalist and Communist parties, was carried out by Nationalist agents, and this could only have been done with Chiang’s authorization, as personal vengeance: a son for a son.

By the time the Long March began, Chiang had devised a carefully crafted swap: the survival of the CCP for Ching-kuo. It was not an offer that could be spelled out. He executed his plan in subtle ways. His scheme was to keep the Reds temporarily confined, and then use the Japanese to break them. Chiang regarded war with Japan as inevitable, and was well aware that Russia wanted this war. Stalin’s most dreaded scenario was that Japan would conquer China, and then, with China’s resources and a porous 7,000-kilometer border, would attack the Soviet Union. Chiang reckoned that once the Sino-Japanese war started, Moscow would be bound to order its Chinese clients to get active against Japan. Until that day, Chiang would allow the Reds to survive, which he hoped would be a big enough quid pro quo to get his son back.

Chiang did not want the Reds to cling on in the rich heartland of China. His aim was to drive them into a more barren and sparsely populated corner, where he could box them in. The prison he had in mind was the Yellow Earth Plateau in northwest China, mainly the northern part of Shaanxi province. To make absolutely sure that the Reds would walk into his fold, Chiang allowed a Communist base to flourish there, while vigorously stamping out the others elsewhere in China.

The main person Chiang used to implement this scheme was none other than Shao Li-tzu, the man who had taken Chiang’s son to Russia. Shao was appointed governor of Shaanxi in April 1933. Though Chiang certainly knew Shao’s true colors, he never exposed him, and continued to use him as if he were a bona fide Nationalist. Chiang’s relationship with Shao, as with many other key moles, was an almost unbelievably complex web of intrigue, deceit, bluff and double-bluff that eventually was to spin out of his control and contribute to his downfall.

Chiang’s calculation was that only a mole could foster a Red pocket, as any authentic Nationalist would destroy it. And, indeed, it was only after Shao was appointed to the area that what had hitherto been a tiny Red guerrilla operation began to grow in Shaanxi (and the edge of Gansu immediately to the west). At the exact moment the Long March began, in mid-October 1934, Chiang came to Shaanxi province for a visit. While publicly calling for the Red “bandits” to be “wiped out,” he allowed the Red base to expand in an unprecedented manner; inside a few months, it had grown to cover 30,000 sq km, with a population of 900,000.

What Chiang had created was a corral into which he would herd all the different detachments of the Red Army as he drove them out of their various pockets in the heartland of China. His plan was to weaken them significantly along the way, but not kill them off entirely. Chiang later told an American emissary: “I drove the Communists from Jiangxi to … northern Shaanxi, where their number was reduced to a few thousands and they were left unpursued.”

The way he steered them was by communicating his own deployments by radio, which he knew would be intercepted. The Reds found that “enemy telegrams were constantly intercepted and decoded by us, and our army knew the intentions and movements of the enemy like the back of our hand.” But Chiang declined to change his codes. And the Reds went where there were no enemy troops, or very few.