Mao: The Unknown Story

WITH THE CONNIVANCE of his three Party allies, Mao offered Kuo-tao only the token position of deputy chairman of the Military Council, which was now a hollow shell, not even a rubber stamp. Kuo-tao and his subordinates demanded that he must lead the army. Mao responded with a stony silence. During the stand-off, the troops began to run out of food. The two armies, totaling about 90,000 men, were crowded into a Tibetan highland region that was just able to sustain its own population, but whose economy was completely thrown out of kilter by the advent of this huge force. “We were reduced to fighting for food with the local population,” one Red Army officer recalled. Marchers cut down fields of barley, depriving the locals of their livelihood for the coming year. Mao, characteristically, treated this plundering — which probably made the difference between life and death for many thousands — as a joke: “This is our only foreign debt,” he said to his American spokesman Edgar Snow, in a manner that Snow described as “humorous.”

The Tibetans, not surprisingly, hated the Reds. Excellent marksmen, they launched guerrilla attacks from the forests. Long March diaries recorded: “There were a lot of corpses along the way, mostly stragglers killed by the barbarians.” “Came across three stragglers (cut down by barbarian cavalry).”

In the end, Mao had to let Kuo-tao have the top army job. On 18 July, Kuo-tao was appointed Chief Commissar of the Red Army, “directly commanding all the armies.” But Mao kept control of the Party leadership.

AT THE BEGINNING of August 1935, a detailed plan was agreed for going north — in order, as Mao put it, to be “close to the Soviet Union, where we can receive help … planes and artillery.” The plan envisaged going first to Gansu, and then sending a unit on to Xinjiang, which was a Soviet satellite, “and building airports and arsenals.” It was during this operation to move north that Mao machinated to scupper Kuo-tao’s chances of making contact with the Russians before he himself did.

The agreed plan involved dividing the army: the main force under Kuo-tao and Zhu De would seize the town of Aba and then go on north, while a smaller force, known as the Right Column, was to take a different route farther east, via Banyou. By Mao’s choice, he and the Center went with the Right Column, which contained the bulk of his old troops, under Lin Biao and Peng De-huai, though these now answered to two of Kuo-tao’s commanders. Nine days after Kuo-tao and his force had departed, on 15 August, Mao cabled Kuo-tao in the name of the Politburo, dictating a total change of course: “the main force must go via Banyou,” i.e., follow the same route as the Right Column. Mao was thus tearing up the agreed plan and demanding that Kuo-tao and the many tens of thousands of troops in the other column reverse course and come to him.

Kuo-tao replied on 19 August that he was very near Aba, where there was plenty of food, and that he planned to take the town in a couple of days. He argued hard for sticking to the Aba route, pointing out that there were “three or four parallel roads to the north, with plenty of people and food,” whereas “the road to Banyou is totally unknown.”

Mao used his control of the political leadership to put pressure on Kuo-tao. Next day he sent Kuo-tao a resolution in the name of the Politburo, saying that his forces were too far to the west. The route Kuo-tao had taken by a unanimous decision was suddenly described as “extremely disadvantageous,” and Kuo-tao himself was accused of being “opportunist”—for “choosing the road with fewest obstacles.” Using a label like “opportunist” was a way of threatening to condemn him with a political charge.

Mao’s aim in all this was to keep himself always ahead of Kuo-tao. This would also mean that Kuo-tao and his army would be dragged through calamitous conditions. By now Mao had discovered that, whilst Kuo-tao’s route was plain sailing, his own route, via Banyou (which he had chosen himself), was actually a dire one. It went through the most murderous terrain, a huge swampland that would take at least a week to cross and whose hazards included: no inhabitants — and therefore no food and shelter; an atrocious climate — dark fogs, lashing storms and hail; few trees, so really hard to make a fire; and treacherous, quicksand-like, and often poisonous mud that could swallow a person up with one false step. All this at an altitude of over 3,000 meters, and a night-time temperature below zero even in August.