Mao: The Unknown Story

With his back to the wall, Mao fought with fearsome willpower and enormous rage, condemning Peng with political labels like “right-wing,” and accusing him of stirring up Lin Biao. When Lin tried to reason, Mao just bellowed: “You are a baby! You don’t know a thing!” Lin could not compete with Mao in a shouting match, and was bludgeoned into silence. Peng was doomed by his own decency and decorum. Unlike Mao, he was shy about fighting for power for himself, even though his cause was good. Nor could he match Mao in mud-slinging and “political” smearing.

Mao got support from the deeply compromised Party No. 1, Lo Fu, who stigmatized Peng and Peng’s supporters as “right-wing opportunists.” In doing so, he acted against his own feelings, under the shadow of blackmail by Mao. Others were silent. Taking on Mao was no small thing. Apart from the terrifying atmosphere he created on the spot, and the sense of urgency and demoralization created by being on the run for some eight months, a sustained fight could well have led to the Party and the army being split. So Mao kept his job. His hatred for Peng because of Huili lasted for the rest of Peng’s life, and he started to take revenge immediately. After the meeting, a close friend of Peng’s, who had also brought up the tremendous casualties in the battles initiated by Mao, and had opposed marking time in Guizhou, found himself denounced. He understood that Peng was the implicit target: “it was inconvenient to denounce Peng De-huai by name, so I was denounced instead.”

Mao was astute enough to agree to a trade-off. He withdrew the order to take Huili, and agreed, finally and explicitly, to “go north at once to join up with” Chang Kuo-tao. He had been putting this off for four months, and in doing so had lost some 30,000 men, more than half of the force with him. Because of him, the soldiers under him had walked at least an extra 2,000 km, often on lacerated feet.

But Mao had made tremendous headway towards achieving his goal. Not only did he now have a formal top military job, but his puppet Lo Fu had established himself as the de facto Party No. 1. These four months of ruthless sacrificial procrastination had made a critical difference. Mao had not entirely averted a power struggle with Chang Kuo-tao, but he had vastly improved his chances.

Mao at once began making preparations, and his most important step was to dispatch a reliable envoy to Moscow to establish his status. (Someone had to go in person as there was no radio communication.) The man he chose had no political ambitions of his own, was obliging, and senior enough to deal with any problems that might come up in Moscow. This was Chen Yun, a member of the Secretariat. Mao chose his spokesman well. In Moscow, Chen delivered a carefully crafted message which gave the impression that the majority of the high command had elected Mao as their leader at a proper meeting: “an enlarged Politburo meeting … removed the [old] leadership and put comrade Mao Tse-tung in the leadership.”

MAO’S GROUP HAD now reached west-central Sichuan, near Tibet, marching straight north towards Chang Kuo-tao. This next stretch provided the backdrop for the primal myth about the Long March — the crossing of the bridge over the Dadu River. This river constituted a formidable natural barrier. In late May, swollen with the Himalayan snows, it was a raging torrent, trapped between towering cliffs. Its rock-strewn bed concealed treacherous whirlpools that made wading or swimming across impossible.

There was no way around, and only one bridge, which had been built in the early eighteenth century as part of the imperial road connecting Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. It was a magnificent suspension bridge, 101 meters long and over 3 meters wide, carried by 13 thick iron chains, 9 on the bottom, with gaps a foot wide between each chain. Wooden planks paved the surface, and covered the gaps.

This bridge is the center of the Long March myth, fed to the journalist Edgar Snow in 1936. Crossing the bridge, Snow wrote, “was the most critical single incident of the Long March.” As he describes it:

half this wooden flooring had been removed [by the Nationalists], and before them [the marchers] only the bare iron chains swung to a point midway in the stream. At the northern bridgehead an enemy machine-gun nest faced them, and behind it were positions held by a regiment of White troops … [W]ho would have thought the Reds would insanely try to cross on the chains alone? But that was what they did.

He described men being shot and falling into the river.

Paraffin was thrown on the [remaining] planking, and it began to burn. By then about twenty Reds were moving forward on their hands and knees, tossing grenade after grenade into the enemy machine-gun nest.