Jung Chang - Mao - The Unknown Story

Many years later, in a rare moment of candor, Chou revealed to a niece how he had picked his wife. He mentioned the woman with whom he had been in love, and said: “When I decided to give my whole life to the revolution, I felt that she was not suited to be a lifelong partner.” He needed a spouse who would be as devoted as he was. “And so I chose your aunt,” he said, “and started writing to her. We established our relationship through correspondence.” He entered a loveless marriage at the age of twenty-seven, with a 21-year-old zealot called Deng Ying-chao, who was noticeably plain and ungainly.

Tenacious and indefatigable, even impervious to cold, Chou was a good administrator and a brilliant organizer. Moscow spotted him, and gave him the crucial task of creating the Chinese Communist army. In 1924 he was sent back to China, where he soon became director of the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy, the Nationalists’ officer-training base founded by the Russians. Chou’s secret responsibility was to plant Communist agents among the higher ranks, with a view to taking over part of the Nationalist army when the time came — which he did in the form of organizing the Nanchang Mutiny in August 1927, after Chiang broke with the CCP. By the time the mutineers were defeated on the south coast, Chou was delirious with malaria and kept yelling “Charge! Charge!” He was carried onto a small boat by colleagues, and escaped to Hong Kong through seas so violent they had to tie themselves to the mast to keep from being swept overboard.

After that, he proceeded to Shanghai, where he ran the Party’s daily business from the beginning of 1928. He proved to be a genius at operating in clandestine conditions, as people who worked with him testify. That summer he went to Russia, where he met Stalin before the 6th CCP Congress convened there. He was the dominant figure at the congress, delivering no fewer than three key reports, as well as serving as the congress secretary. His domain was vast: he set up the Chinese KGB, under Moscow’s guidance, and ran its assassination squad. But organizing the Chinese Red Army was his main job.

Among the qualities that made Chou an ideal apparatchik were discipline and unswerving obedience to Moscow’s line, as well as slavishness. He could absorb any amount of caning from his masters. In future years, as prime minister under Mao, he was willing to abase himself repeatedly, using such toe-curling language that his audiences would cringe with embarrassment. He had already begun producing humiliating self-criticisms decades earlier. “I … would like the whole Party to see and condemn my errors,” he said in 1930, and pledged to criticize his “serious systematic errors” himself in the Party press. Once, at a meeting he attended, one of Moscow’s German envoys, perhaps spotting a streak of masochism in Chou, said: “As for Comrade En-lai, we of course should smack him on the bottom. But we don’t want to kick him out. We must reform him … and see if he corrects his mistakes.” Chou just sat there and took it.

Chou does not seem to have aspired to be No. 1; he was not a program-setter, and seems to have needed orders from above. He could also be long-winded. One of his subordinates in the 1920s remembered: “Once he started talking, he could not stop. What he said was clear, but not punchy … he would talk as if teaching elementary school children.” He could talk for seven or eight hours non-stop, boring his listeners so thoroughly that they would doze off.

Chou’s loyalty, combined with undoubted ability, was the main reason Moscow picked him to be chief Party leader from 1928, so it fell to him to deal with the dispute in the Zhu — Mao Army. On Moscow’s instructions, he wrote to the army on 21 August 1929, giving Mao full backing and rejecting all the criticisms. Mao, he insisted, was “absolutely not patriarchal.” Mao’s abolition of Zhu De’s post was judged correct. An-gong, the Party envoy who had spoken up against Mao, was recalled. He was soon killed in battle.

Even though Mao had broken all the rules, Shanghai endorsed him. Mao was insubordinate, but a winner. His ambition demonstrated the kind of lust for power essential to conquer China, especially when the Communist forces numbered mere thousands, up against millions on the Nationalist side.

There were two added factors that came into play in Mao’s favor at this moment. Two thousand kilometers north of his location the Russians controlled the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria, which cut 1,500 km through northeast China from Siberia to Vladivostok. Along with this, Moscow had inherited from the Tsars by far the largest foreign concession in China, occupying well over 1,000 square kilometers. Communist Russia had initially promised to give up its extraterritorial privileges, but it never kept its promise, and the Chinese seized the railway in summer 1929.

Moscow formed a Special Far East Army, headed by its former chief military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, Marshal Blyukher, and prepared to invade Manchuria. Stalin also mooted organizing an uprising in Manchuria to occupy Harbin, the major city in northern Manchuria, “and establish a revolutionary government.” With characteristic brutality, Stalin listed one aim, almost casually, in brackets, as: “(massacre the landowners …).” In November Russian troops invaded, moving 125 km into Manchuria.

Moscow wanted the Chinese Communists to create some diversionary military pressure. It ordered the CCP to “mobilise the whole Party and the population to be ready to defend the Soviet Union with arms.” It was in this context of protecting Russia’s state interests that Mao’s drive assumed urgent importance. Chou’s letter reinstating Mao enjoined: “your first and foremost task is to develop your guerrilla area … and expand the Red Army …” On 9 October the Soviet Politburo, with Stalin present, named “the regions of Mao Tse-tung” (no mention of Zhu) as the key area for expanding partisan warfare in connection with the Manchuria railway crisis.

Moscow had another pressing reason to single out Mao, and this was to do with Trotsky, Stalin’s bête noire , whom he had just exiled. Trotsky had a small, but dedicated, following in China, and Professor Chen Tu-hsiu, the former head of the CCP, cast as the scapegoat by Moscow two years before, was showing signs of tilting towards Trotskyism. Chen also spoke out against the CCP supporting Russia over the railway — a stance, he said, that “only makes people assume that we dance to the tune of roubles.”

Stalin was worried that Chen might throw his considerable prestige behind the Trotskyists. Moscow’s agents in Shanghai were concerned that Mao, to whom Chen had once been a mentor, might side with him.

For all these reasons, the Russians backed Mao, and promoted him with zeal in their media. During the critical months of the Manchuria crisis there were no fewer than four items about Mao in the Soviet Party’s key organ, Pravda , which was soon describing him as the “leader” ( yozhd —the same word as used for Stalin). No other Chinese Communist was ever so lavishly acclaimed — not even Mao’s nominal superiors, like the Party general secretary.

When Chou’s instructions to reinstate Mao reached them, Zhu De and his colleagues bowed to Shanghai’s edict, and forwarded the letter to Mao. At the time, Mao was staying in a picturesque village some distance away, in an elegant two-story villa with a palm tree in the courtyard. He had been taking his ease, consuming plenty of milk (a rarity for the Chinese), as well as a kilo of beef stewed into soup every day, with a whole chicken on top. He would describe how fit he was, applying his characteristic yardstick: “I can eat a lot and shit a lot.”