Jung Chang - Mao - The Unknown Story

Fifteen months after his arrival, Mao left behind a depleted land. In his first experience of running a base he had shown that he had no economic strategy but looting, tantamount to “slash and burn.” A Party inspector wrote to Shanghai:

Before the Red Army came … there was quite an atmosphere of peaceful and happy existence … the peasants … had quite enough to live on … Since the Red Army came, things were totally changed. Because the Red Army’s sole income was robbing the rich … because even petty bourgeois, rich peasants and small pedlars were all treated as enemies, and because after great destruction, no attention was paid to construction or to the economic crisis, the countryside is totally bankrupt, and is collapsing by the day.

Mao’s men had bled the place dry, and the locals loathed them. When he departed, he left behind his wounded and the civilian Communists. Those captured by the regular government army were lucky — they were merely machine-gunned to death. Those who fell into the hands of local forces were disemboweled, burned alive, or slashed slowly to death. Many hundreds were killed.

A report to Shanghai by the stay-behind Party committee revealed that the bitterness bequeathed by Mao’s regime was so intense that even the Nationalists “burning houses and killing ring-leaders did not generate hatred from the average masses for the reactionaries.” People were defecting when they could: those “under our Red power naturally do not dare to act reactionary,” the report stated. “But the masses outside [our control] are crossing over to the Nationalists en masse.” The report blamed the locals, saying that they “have always been no good.”

The original outlaws, who were mostly locals and stayed behind, fared much better. Most of them survived — including the two chiefs, Yuan and Zuo. However, these two met their deaths a year later, in March 1930—at the hands of Communists who returned to the area. Moscow had ordered the CCP to double-cross those it termed “bandits”—in effect, to use them and then kill them. “Alliance with bandits and other similar groups is only applicable before an uprising,” stated one resolution. “Afterwards you must disarm them and severely suppress them … Their leaders must be regarded as leaders of counter-revolutionaries, even if they helped uprisings. And these leaders must all be completely eliminated.”

Yuan and Zuo’s followers fled back into the depths of the mountains and became fiercely anti-Communist. A Red search unit reported that “the local population resented us, and did everything to protect the [outlaws].” Having lived under both the bandits and the Communists, the locals knew which they preferred.

ON THE JOURNEY out of the outlaw land, Mao loped along, cracking jokes to his entourage. He had cause to be cheerful. Shanghai and Moscow’s acceptance of his demands showed that he could get his way. Indeed, at that very moment, January 1929, in Moscow, GRU chief Jan Berzin and Stalin’s China apparatchik, Pavel Mif, were meeting to discuss how the Soviet army could give “practical help to Zhu — Mao,” whom Moscow was tracking closely. This is the first known occasion when Moscow was arranging military aid specifically for the Mao — Zhu force, now publicly described as “the most formidable among the Communists.”

Government forces were in hot pursuit, and Mao’s army had to fight pitched battles, in one of which Zhu De’s wife was captured. Later she was executed and her head stuck on a pole in Changsha. It was during this low point in Zhu’s fortunes that Mao mounted a power grab against him. Within two weeks of leaving the outlaw land, Mao had abolished Zhu De’s post as military supremo, awarded by Shanghai, and concentrated all power in his own hands. As the Red force was being attacked by the Nationalists, Zhu did not retaliate. He was no match for Mao in exploiting a crisis.

Mao did not inform Shanghai about his seizure of power. Instead he wrote to tell Shanghai how glad he was to submit to Party orders. “How should the Red Army proceed?” he wrote. “We particularly thirst for instructions. Please could you send them winging my way?” “The resolutions of the 6th Congress are extremely correct. We accept them jumping for joy.” “In the future, we hope the Centre gives us a letter every month.” Mao was currying favor with Shanghai hoping that when they got wind of his coup against Zhu De, they would be better disposed towards him.

Still, Zhu De refrained from exposing Mao. Zhu had no craving for power, nor any gift for intrigue. And since reporting to Shanghai was the job of the chief, to write himself would amount to declaring war on Mao.

In March, Mao had another lucky break, this time involving the Nationalists. Although a central government had been in place for nearly a year, Chiang Kai-shek faced powerful opponents, some of whom now started a war against him. Troops who were hot on Mao’s trail were pulled back to deal with the rebels. A delighted Mao informed Shanghai that the enemy, who had come within half a kilometer of his rearguard, had “suddenly turned back” and let him go.

By this time Mao had entered the southeast coastal province of Fujian, where he managed to capture Tingzhou — a sizable city, but weakly defended. Located on a navigable river teeming with cargo boats, it was a wealthy place, with strong overseas links. Grand European buildings stood next door to ornate bazaars selling wares from all over Southeast Asia. Mao filled his coffers by robbing the rich. “Our supply is no problem,” he told Shanghai, “and morale is extremely high.”

The army acquired a uniform for the first time, from a factory that had been making them for the Nationalists. Up till then Red soldiers had been wearing clothes of all kinds and colors, sometimes even women’s dresses and Catholic priests’ vestments. (One Italian priest was particularly worried about the Reds taking his fascist shirt.) The Communists’ new uniform, gray, was like the Nationalist one, but had a red star on the cap, and red insignia.

The city’s defender, Brigadier Kuo, had been captured alive on Mao’s specific orders, and then killed. A rally was held at which his corpse was hung upside down from a chestnut tree by the dais where Mao made a speech, and the corpse was then paraded through the streets. To show that the old order had been supplanted, Mao also had the city hall razed to the ground.

He set up headquarters in a magnificent old-style villa overlooking the river. But in May his new haven was disturbed when a man called Liu An-gong arrived, sent by Shanghai to take up the No. 3 position in the Zhu — Mao Army. An-gong was fresh from Russia, where he had received military training. He was appalled by what Mao had done to Zhu De, and the way he was running the army. Mao, he charged, was “power-grabbing,” “dictatorial”—and was “forming his own system and disobeying the leadership.”

Mao could no longer conceal his coup. On 1 June 1929, nearly four months after he had pushed Zhu De out, Mao wrote to Shanghai saying that “the Army” had “decided temporarily to suspend” Zhu’s post because “it found itself in a special situation.” He did his best to minimize the impact by tucking the information away as item 10 in his long 14-item report. The rest of the report was couched in a very obedient, even ingratiating tone, larded with professions of eagerness to receive Party instructions: “please … set up a special communications office,” he wrote, to make it possible to communicate directly with Shanghai, adding: “Here is opium worth 10,000 yuan as start-up funds for the office.” Mao was trying everything, even drug money, to coax Shanghai to endorse his seizure of power.

With An-gong on his side — and the Red Army no longer being pursued by the Nationalists — Zhu De now stood up to Mao. And he had most of the troops behind him. Mao was extremely unpopular, as an official report later told Shanghai: “the mass as a whole was discontented with Mao.” “Many comrades felt really bitter about him” and “regarded him as dictatorial.” “He has a foul temper and likes to abuse people.” For the sake of balance, Zhu was also criticized, but for trivial things like “bragging,” and lacking decorum—“when he was in full flow, he would unconsciously roll his trousers up to his thighs, looking like a hooligan, with no dignity.”