Jung Chang - Mao - The Unknown Story

The Red Army had only one-tenth of Chiang’s strength, and was far less well armed. Chiang’s army, moreover, was now much better trained, thanks to the work of a large group of German military advisers. In particular, the Generalissimo had obtained the services of the man who had played the key role in reconstituting the German army in secret after the First World War, General Hans von Seeckt. So Moscow built up a “German” network of its own to help the Chinese Reds to counter Chiang’s advisers. It dispatched a German-speaking military expert, Manfred Stern (later famous as General Kléber in the Spanish Civil War), to be the chief military adviser, based in Shanghai. And the German Otto Braun was sent to Ruijin in September, as de facto army commander on the spot.

In Ruijin, Braun settled in the barricaded area reserved for Party leaders, in a thatched house in the middle of rice paddies. He was asked to “stay inside my house as much as possible for my safety as a ‘foreign devil,’ and in view of the constant [Nationalist] clamour about ‘Russian agents.’ ” He was given a Chinese name, Li De—“Li the German”—and provided with a “wife,” whose one vital qualification was that “she had to be big,” and “of very strong physique,” the assumption being that foreigners needed strong women to cope with their sexual demands.

According to Mrs. Zhu De (successor to the one executed by the Nationalists), whose information reflected the gossip of the day, “no women comrades wanted to marry a foreigner who could not speak Chinese. So for a while they [the Party] could not find a suitable partner.” Eventually they lit on a good-looking country girl who had been a child bride and had escaped to join the revolution. However, in spite of high-level pressure, she refused. “A few days later, she received an order: ‘Li De is a leading comrade sent to help the Chinese revolution. To be his wife is the need of the revolution. The Organization has decided that you marry him.’ She obeyed, with great reluctance … they did not get on.”

In this, her second arranged marriage, this woman bore Braun a son. The boy had dark skin — closer in color to that of a Chinese than a white person’s, which prompted Mao to crack a joke: “Well, this defeats the theory of the superiority of the Germanic race.”

The man closest to Braun was Po Ku, the Party No. 1, who had worked with him in Shanghai, and could talk to him in Russian. They played cards with the interpreters and went horse-riding together. Chou En-lai, as the No. 2 and the senior military man, also saw Braun a lot. But Braun had little to do with Mao, whom he met only at official functions. On such occasions, Braun wrote, Mao “maintained a solemn reserve.” Mao spoke no Russian, and kept his guard up with Braun, regarding him as a threat.

BY SPRING 1934, Chiang’s expedition had been pressing in on the base for about six months. Neither Moscow’s advisers nor any of the CCP leaders had a solution for countering Chiang’s blockhouse war and overwhelming military superiority. Red leaders in Ruijin knew the base’s days were numbered, and began to plan a pull-out. On 25 March, Moscow sent Ruijin a cable which was intercepted by British intelligence, saying that the prospects for the base were dire — even more dire, it said, than the CCP itself seemed to appreciate. As soon as Po Ku received this message, he started trying to get Mao out of the way. On 27 March, Shanghai wired Moscow to say that Ruijin “communicates that Mao has been ill for a long time and [it] requests that he be sent to Moscow.” But Mao was not ill at all. Po Ku and his colleagues did not want him around, in case he made trouble again.

Ruijin’s request to evacuate Mao was rejected. On 9 April Moscow cabled that it was “against visit of Mao” because the journey, which would involve passing through White areas, would be too risky. “He absolutely must be treated in the soviet region [i.e. Red area in China], even if that necessitates large costs. Only in the case of total impossibility of treating him on the spot and of danger of fatal outcome of illness can we agree to him coming to Moscow.”

Mao had no wish to be evicted. “My health is good. I’m not going anywhere,” he rejoined to Po Ku, who controlled communications with Moscow. But Po soon came up with another solution — to leave Mao behind to hold the fort. Keeping the head of state in situ would be a perfect way of proclaiming that the Red state lived on.

No one wanted to be left behind. Many who stayed lost their lives, either in battle, or captured and executed. Mao’s youngest brother Tse-tan was one of them. Another was the friend Mao had brought to the CCP’s 1st Congress, Ho Shu-heng. Yet another was the former Party No. 1, Chu Chiu-pai. And resentment was strong among those who survived. The No. 2 stay-behind, Chen Yi, had a serious shrapnel wound in the hip. He had himself carried on a stretcher to Zhu De, and pleaded, in vain, to be taken along. Two decades later he recalled with anger how the decision was broken to him (incidentally giving a rare insight into how CCP leaders viewed their colleagues’ sophistry): “I was given hot air: ‘You are a senior official, so we ought to carry you along on a stretcher. But because you have been working in Jiangxi for well over ten years [ sic ], you have influence and prestige … Now that the Centre is going, we can’t face the masses if we don’t leave you behind.’ ” The man spouting this hot air was Chou En-lai.

Mao knew that if he were left behind he would be far removed from the Party’s center and from the army — even if he happened to survive. He did not intend to be got rid of so easily. At this point, having been deprived of military command, Mao was not with any army. But as government chairman he was his own master and could choose what he wanted to do and where he wanted to be. Over the next half a year, he devoted himself to making sure that Po Ku and Co. could not leave him marooned when they left.

So he staked out a position on the escape route. The first place he camped out was the southern front, which at the time was the envisaged exit point. Here the Communists faced the Cantonese warlord who had been doing a lucrative trade with them in tungsten, and who hated Chiang. Unlike other fronts, where the Nationalists were pressing in deeper and deeper, here there was not much fighting. In late April, the Cantonese warlord began talking to the Reds about providing a corridor through which they could move out, and then on. As soon as Mao learned this, he descended on the HQ of the southern front in Huichang, right on the main road out of the Red area.

It was clear to local leaders that Mao had no official business to explain his presence, and moreover that he had time on his hands. He went hill-climbing for leisure, and would drop in on commanders, settling himself comfortably on their beds and chatting on and on. He even did things like correcting training programs for local units, sometimes taking hours to correct one document.

In July, he left as abruptly as he had descended. He had learned that the exit point had been shifted to the west. That month, a unit 8,000-plus strong was dispatched to scout the route. Mao returned to Ruijin. A month later, as soon as the new exit point was confirmed — Yudu, a town 60 km west of Ruijin — Mao turned up at local Party HQ with an entourage of some two dozen, including a secretary, a medic, a cook, a groom, and a squadron of guards. The HQ lay a stone’s throw across the street from a river crossing which was just beyond a Sung-dynasty archway in the city wall, and this was the chosen breakout point. Mao squatted here to make sure he was taken along with the main force when the leadership left.

Before he left Ruijin, Mao decided to hand over to the Party his treasure hoard, the gold, silver and jewelry he had kept hidden in a cave for the past two years. He told his bank-manager brother Tse-min to give it to Po Ku. By concealing his haul until the eleventh hour, Mao had displayed a major lack of commitment to the Party, and to Moscow, and this level of disloyalty might be held against him by the Kremlin. Mao had broken many rules, including all three of the cardinal principles he himself had codified: always obey orders, do not take a needle or thread from the masses (i.e., no unauthorized looting), and, particularly, hand in all captured goods. But “privatizing” loot was uniquely unacceptable, as it showed that he had contemplated splitting from Moscow.