Jung Chang - Mao - The Unknown Story

There was still a degree of democratic procedure among the Communists, and issues were frequently debated and voted on. Party representatives in the army met on 22 June and voted to dismiss Mao as Party boss of the army and reinstate Zhu as military supremo. Mao later described himself as having been “very isolated.” Before the vote he had threatened: “I have a squad, and I will fight!” But there was nothing he could do, as his followers were disarmed before the meeting.

Having lost control of his own force, Mao started jockeying to recover power. His plan was to take control of the region where he was, a newly occupied territory in Fujian near the southeast coast, complete with its own Red force. It was also the richest area the Communists had ever held, with a population of some 1.25 million. Mao told the new leadership of the army that now that he had been voted out, he wanted to go and “do some work with local civilians.” Nobody seems to have realized that this request was a cover to enable Mao to gatecrash on the local Reds and commandeer their Party organization.

Mao left HQ on a litter, with his wife and a few faithful followers. One of them remembered: “When we left … our horses were confiscated from us, so our entourage really looked rather crestfallen.” This bedraggled group headed for Jiaoyang, where Mao had got a local crony to call a congress. The Zhu — Mao Army had helped create the base, so Mao had clout, even though Shanghai had not assigned it to Mao, but to the Fujian Committee. Mao’s plan was to manipulate the congress and insert the followers who had left the army with him into the leading posts.

By 10 July some fifty local delegates had gathered in Jiaoyang, having been notified that the congress was to open next day. Instead, Mao sent them away for a whole week to conduct “all sorts of investigations,” in the words of a report written immediately afterwards. When the conclave finally opened, Mao feigned illness, and further delayed the meeting. In fact he was not ill, his secretary later disclosed. The report complained that the congress “lasted too long” and operated in a “slack” style, being strung out for “as long as twenty days”—by which time government forces were closing in. At this point, the report continued, “news came that [Nationalist] troops were coming … so the Front Committee … changed the plan … and the congress … was closed …”

The delegates left without voting for the key posts. As soon as their backs were turned, Mao assigned these posts to his cronies, passing off his action as the decision of the congress. One of his men was made de facto head of the regional Red Army force. Mao’s followers were all from Hunan, and could not even speak the local dialect.

When the local Reds discovered that Mao had deprived them of control of their own region, they were outraged. In the following year they were to rebel against Mao, which led him to unleash a bloody purge.

While the congress was still going on, the delegates had already shown that they feared and disliked Mao. The report said that when he was present “the delegates rarely spoke,” whereas in his absence “they began to debate passionately, and things improved tremendously.” Mao had no mandate over this civilian Party branch. That authority belonged to the Fujian Provincial Committee. The delegates had wanted this body to be represented at the congress, to protect them from Mao. However, the post-mortem noted, “our messenger was arrested, and our report was lost, so there was no one from the Provincial Committee to … guide the congress.” The post-mortem did not say whether anyone suspected foul play, but there was already a pattern of communications being suddenly broken at critical junctures for Mao.

Once he had seized control of this new territory, Mao set out to undermine Zhu De. An ally in this scheme was a man from Zhu’s staff called Lin Biao, a loner and a maverick in his early twenties, whom Mao had been cultivating ever since Lin had come to the outlaw land the year before.

Lin Biao had three qualities that caught Mao’s eye. One was military talent. Lin had wanted to be an army man ever since childhood, and had relished life at the Nationalists’ Military Academy at Whampoa. He was well versed in military strategy, and had proved his flair in battle. His second quality was that he was unconventional. Unlike many other senior military men in the CCP, he had not been trained in the Soviet Union and was not steeped in Communist discipline. It was widely known in Zhu De’s ranks that Lin had kept loot, including gold rings, for himself, and had contracted gonorrhea. The third quality, and the one most welcome to Mao, was that Lin bore a grudge against Zhu, his superior, for having reprimanded him; this was something that Lin’s extreme sense of pride could not take.

As soon as Lin appeared, Mao sought him out and befriended him, winning his favor by inviting him to lecture to his own (Mao’s) troops, an honor he accorded no one else. From here on, Mao built a special relationship with Lin. Decades later he was to make him his defense minister and second in command. In this long-lasting crony relationship, Mao took great care to massage Lin’s vanity and to let him act above the rules, in return for which Mao was able to call repeatedly on Lin’s complicity.

Their first collaboration occurred at the end of July 1929, when the Nationalists attacked. As the military supremo, Zhu drew up the battle plan, which called for all units to rendezvous on 2 August. But come the day, the unit Lin commanded was nowhere to be seen. He had stayed behind, together with Mao and the Fujian unit that Mao had just collected. Together, the two of them had control over about half of the Red forces, then totalling upwards of 6,000, and Zhu had to fight with only half the men he expected. Nonetheless, his under-strength force acquitted itself well.

But if half the army refused to obey his orders, Zhu could not command it effectively. With the army gridlocked, loyal Party members and Red Army men looked to Shanghai to sort the problem out.

AT THIS TIME, the mainstay of the Party leadership in Shanghai was Chou En-lai. The man who held the formal top post as general secretary, Hsiang Chung-fa, a sailor-dockworker, was a figurehead, appointed solely because of his proletarian background. But the real decision-makers were operatives sent by Moscow, who in those days were mainly non-Russians, mostly European Communists. The immediate bosses were a German called Gerhart Eisler (later Moscow’s intelligence chief in the US) and a Pole known as Rylsky. These agents controlled the Party budget, down to the slightest detail, as well as communications with Moscow. They made all policy decisions, and monitored their outcome. Moscow’s advisers supervised military activities. Their Chinese colleagues referred to them as mao-zi , “Hairy Ones,” as they had more body hair than the Chinese. “German Hairy,” “Polish Hairy,” “American Hairy,” etc., frequently cropped up in conversations among the Chinese. One probably stooped agent was known as “Hunchback Hairy.” The “Hairies” gave orders through Chou En-lai, who later won international fame as prime minister for a quarter of a century under Mao. But the real Chou was not the suave diplomat foreigners saw, but a ruthless apparatchik, in thrall to his Communist faith. Throughout his life he served his Party with a dauntless lack of personal integrity.

Chou first encountered communism in Japan, where he arrived in 1917 as a nineteen-year-old student just as the Bolshevik Revolution broke out. He made his choice while studying in Western Europe, joining the Chinese Communist Party branch in France in 1921. There he became a fervent believer, and his dedication was reflected in his asceticism. Good-looking and attractive to women, he was far from indifferent to beauty himself. When he first arrived in France, he was constantly heard admiring its women. “What beautiful girls!.. The women here [in Paris] are so attractive,” he wrote to a friend back home. Soon he acquired a sexy girlfriend, with whom he was very much in love, but once he converted to the Red faith he did what many missionaries had done: he chose a wife not based on love but on whether she could be a partner in the mission.