Mao: The Unknown Story

5. HIJACKING A RED FORCE AND TAKING OVER BANDIT LAND (1927–28 AGE 33–34)

AT THE TIME Chiang Kai-shek broke with the Communists in April 1927, Stalin had emerged as the No. 1 in the Kremlin and was personally dictating policy on China. His reaction to Chiang’s split was to order the CCP to form its own army without delay and occupy territory, with the long-term aim of conquering China with the gun.

The military option — the use of force to bring the Chinese Communists to power — had been Moscow’s favored approach ever since the Comintern was founded in 1919. As long as the Nationalists were in play, Moscow’s strategy had been for CCP members to infiltrate and subvert the Nationalist armed forces. Once the break came, Stalin ordered the Communists to pull out those units they were able to control, and “form some new corps.”

Stalin sent a trusted fellow Georgian, Beso Lominadze, to China. Jan Berzin, the head of Russian military intelligence, the GRU, wrote to the commissar for war, Kliment Voroshilov, who chaired the China Commission in Moscow, that Russia’s top priority in China now was to establish a Red army. A huge secret military advice and support system for the Chinese Communists was set up in Russia. The GRU had men in all the main Chinese cities, providing arms, funds and medicine, in addition to intelligence that was often critical to the CCP’s survival. Moscow also sent top-level advisers to China to guide the Party’s military operations, while greatly expanding military training for CCP cadres in Russia.

The immediate plan, devised in Moscow, was for the Communist units pulled out of the Nationalist army to move to the south coast to collect arms shipped in from Russia, and set up a base. At the same time, peasant uprisings were ordered in Hunan and three adjacent provinces where there had been militant peasant organizations, with the goal of taking power in these regions.

Mao agreed with the military approach. On 7 August 1927 he told an emergency Party meeting presided over by Lominadze: “power comes out of the barrel of the gun” (a saying that later acquired international fame). But within this broad design, Mao harbored his own agenda — to command both the gun and the Party. His plan was to build his own army, carve out his own territory, and deal with Moscow and Shanghai from a position of strength. To have his own fiefdom would safeguard his physical survival. He would of course remain in the Party, as its association with Russia was his only chance of achieving anything more than being a mere bandit.

At this time, Professor Chen had just been dismissed as Party chief by Lominadze, and made the scapegoat for the Nationalist split. His replacement was a younger man called Chu Chiu-pai, whose main qualification was his closeness to the Russians. Mao was now promoted, from the Central Committee to the Politburo, though still as a second-level member.

It was now that Mao embarked on a series of steps that would take him to the top of the Communist ladder in the space of four years. As of summer 1927, he had no armed men at his service, and held no military command, so he set out to acquire an armed force by taking over troops that other Communists had built up.

AT THE TIME, the main force the Reds were able to pull out of the Nationalist army consisted of 20,000 troops stationed in and around Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province, about 250 km southeast of Wuhan and 300 km east of Changsha. These troops had nothing to do with Mao. On 1 August they mutinied, on Moscow’s instructions. The main organizer of the mutiny was Chou En-lai, the Party man designated to run the military, with immediate supervision from a Russian military adviser, Kumanin. They then headed straight for Swatow (Shantou) on the coast, 600 km to the south, where the Russians were supposed to ship in arms.

Mao set out to lay his hands on some of these men. On their way to the coast they were scheduled to pass near South Hunan. In early August he proposed to the CCP leadership that he launch a peasant uprising in South Hunan, to establish what he called a big Red base, covering “at least five counties.” In fact, Mao had no intention of trying to start such a rising. He had never organized one, nor did he think it could be done. (The earlier peasant violence in Hunan had been carried out under the protection of the then radical government.) The sole purpose of the proposal was to set up his next request, which was for a large contingent of the mutineers to come to his aid on their way to the coast. Failing to realize that this Hunan initiative was only a ruse to angle for the troops, Shanghai approved Mao’s plan.

The leaders of the Hunan “uprising” were scheduled to meet on 15 August at the Russian consulate in Changsha, to launch the action. But Mao did not turn up, although he was on the outskirts of the city. As he was in charge of the mission, the meeting had to be postponed to the following day, when again he failed to show up. He only finally appeared on the 18th, when he moved into the consulate, for the sake of security. To his angry and frustrated comrades, he offered the excuse that he had been conducting “investigations into the peasantry.”

Mao concealed the true reason for his four-day absence — which was to give himself time to see how the mutineers were faring, and whether they would still be passing South Hunan and thus be available to him. If not, he had no intention of going to South Hunan.

The mutineers had got off to a bad start. Within three days of leaving Nanchang, one-third of them had deserted; many others had died drinking dirty water from rice paddies in humid 30-plus centigrade temperatures. The survivors had already lost nearly half their ammunition. The dwindling ranks were struggling just to survive and make it to the coast, and the chances of any making a detour to help him were nil.

So when Mao finally joined his comrades at the Russian consulate, he demanded that the plans for an uprising in South Hunan be canceled, even though it had been his proposal in the first place. Instead, he insisted on attacking just Changsha, the provincial capital, arguing that they should “narrow down the uprising plan.”

The aim of this new plan was exactly the same as before — to lay his hands on some armed men. At this point the only Red forces anywhere near him were outside Changsha. They consisted of three groups: peasant activists with weapons seized from the police; unemployed miners and mine guards from the mine at Anyuan, which had closed down; and one army unit that had been stranded en route to join the Nanchang mutineers. Altogether, the force totaled several thousand. Mao’s point in advocating an attack on Changsha was that these forces would be deployed for action, and he could maneuver to become their boss.

The ploy was successful. Mao’s proposal to go for Changsha was adopted, and he was put in control by being made head of a “Front Committee.” This made him the Party representative on the spot and thus the man with the final say, in the absence of higher authority. Mao had no military training, but he pitched hard for this job by staging a show of enthusiasm for Moscow’s orders in front of the two Russians at the meeting, who called the shots. “The latest Comintern order” about uprisings was so brilliant, Mao said, “it made me jump for joy three hundred times.”

Mao’s next move was to prevent the troops actually going to Changsha, and instead have them muster at a place where he could abduct them. This place had to be far enough away from Changsha that other Party or Russian representatives could not easily reach it. There was no telephone or radio communication with these forces.

On 31 August, Mao left the Russian consulate, saying that he was going to join the troops. But he did not do this. Instead, he made his way to a town called Wenjiashi, 100 km east of Changsha, and there he stayed. On the launch day set for 11 September, Mao was not with any of the troops, but lying low in Wenjiashi. By the 14th, before the troops had got anywhere near Changsha or suffered serious defeats, he had ordered them to abandon the march on Changsha and converge on his location. As a result, the Party organization in Changsha had to abort the whole design on the 15th. The secretary of the Soviet consulate, Maier, referred to the retreat as “most despicable treachery and cowardice.” Moscow called the affair “a joke of an uprising.” It does not seem to have realized that Mao had set the whole thing up solely in order to snare the armed units.

The operation appears in history books as “the Autumn Harvest Uprising,” portrayed as a peasant uprising led by Mao. It is the founding moment of the international myth about Mao as a peasant leader, and one of the great deceptions of Mao’s career (to cover it up he was to spin an elaborate yarn to his American spokesman, Edgar Snow). Not only was the “uprising” not an authentic peasant undertaking, but Mao was not involved in any action — and actually sabotaged it.

But he got what he was after — control of an armed force, of some 1,500 men. Due south about 170 kilometers from Wenjiashi lay the Jinggang Mountain range, traditional bandit country. Mao had decided to make this his base of operations. The lack of proper roads meant that many of China’s mountain areas were largely out of reach of the authorities. This particular place had an added advantage: it straddled the border of two provinces, and so was on the very outer edge of both provinces’ control.

Mao had a link with a successful outlaw in the area, Yuan Wen-cai. Yuan and his partner Wang Zuo had an army of 500 men and controlled most of one county, Ninggang, which had a population of 130,000. They lived by collecting rents and taxes from the local population.

Mao anticipated problems getting the commanders of the force he had hijacked to go to the bandit country without explicit Party orders, so at Wenjiashi he first sought out a few men he knew already and secured their support, before he called a meeting of the commanders on 19 September. He arranged for his supporters to serve tea and cigarettes so that they could come into the room and keep an eye on things. The argument was fierce — the main commander demanded that they proceed with the old plan and go for Changsha. But Mao was the only Party leader present (the others and the Russians were 100 km away in Changsha), and he prevailed. The force set off for Jinggang Mountain. At first, Mao was such a stranger to the troops that some thought he was a local and tried to grab him to carry guns.

Mao was dressed like a country schoolteacher, in a long blue gown, with a homespun cotton scarf around his neck. Along the way, he talked to soldiers, assessing their condition and gauging their strength—“as if counting family treasure,” one soldier recalled.

When Mao first told the troops that they were about to become “Mountain Lords”—bandits — they were dumbfounded. This was not why they had joined a Communist revolution. But, speaking in the name of the Party, he assured them that they would be special bandits — part of an international revolution. Banditry was also their best chance, he argued: “Mountain Lords have never been wiped out, let alone us.”

Still, many were depressed. They were exhausted, and malaria, suppurating legs and dysentery were rife. Whenever they stopped, they were swamped by their own thick stench, so foul it could be smelled a couple of kilometers away. Sick and wounded would lie down in the grass, and often never get up again. Many deserted. Knowing that he could not force his men to stay, Mao allowed those who wanted to leave to do so, without their guns. Two of the top commanders opted to leave, and went to Shanghai. Both of them later went over to the Nationalists. By the time he reached the outlaw land, Mao had only about 600 men left, having lost well over half his force in a couple of weeks. Most of those who stayed did so because they had no alternative. They became the nucleus from which Mao’s force grew — what he later called the “single spark that started a prairie fire.”

ARRIVING IN BANDIT COUNTRY at the beginning of October Mao’s first step was to visit Yuan, accompanied by only a few men, so as to reassure the bandit chief. Yuan had some armed men hidden nearby in case Mao brought troops. Finding Mao apparently no threat, Yuan had a pig slaughtered for a banquet, and they sat drinking tea and nibbling peanuts and melon seeds.

Mao got his foot in the door by pretending he was only pausing en route to the coast to join the Nanchang mutineers. A deal was struck. Mao could stay temporarily, and would feed his own troops by staging looting expeditions. But to start with, they would be looked after by the outlaws.

By February 1928, four months later, Mao had become the master of his hosts. The finale of this takeover took place after Mao’s men captured the capital of Ninggang county from the government on 18 February, in what was, by the bandits’ standards, a sizable military victory. This was also the first battle that Mao was involved in commanding — watching through binoculars from a mountain opposite.

Three days later, on the 21st, Mao held a public rally of an organized crowd of thousands of people to celebrate the victory. The climax was the killing of the county chief, who had just been captured. An eyewitness described the scene (in cautious language, as he was telling the story under Communist rule): “A fork-shaped wooden frame was driven into the ground … onto which Chang Kai-yang [the county chief] was tied. The whole place was ringed with ropes from one wooden pole to another for hanging slogans. People thrust their spears, suo-biao, into him and killed him that way … Commissar Mao spoke at the rally.” Mao had earlier expressed a special fondness for this weapon, suo-biao. Now, under his very eyes, it pierced the life out of the county chief.

Public execution rallies had become a feature of local life since Mao’s arrival, and he had demonstrated a penchant for slow killing. At one rally, staged to celebrate a looting expedition at the time of the Chinese New Year 1928, he had written couplets on sheets of red paper, which were pasted onto wooden pillars on both sides of the stage. They read:

Watch us kill the bad landlords today.

Aren’t you afraid?

It’s knife slicing upon knife.

Mao addressed the rally, and a local landlord, Kuo Wei-chien, was then put to death in line with the prescriptions of Mao’s poetry.

Mao did not invent public execution, but he added to this ghastly tradition a modern dimension, organized rallies, and in this way made killing compulsory viewing for a large part of the population. To be dragooned into a crowd, powerless to walk away, forced to watch people put to death in this bloody and agonizing way, hearing their screams, struck fear deep into those present.

The traditional bandits could not match Mao and his orchestrated terror, which frightened even them. Yuan and Zuo submitted to Mao’s authority; soon after this they allowed themselves and their men to be formed into a regiment under him. Mao had out-bandited the bandits.

AS SOON AS he had reached the bandit land, Mao had sent a messenger to Party headquarters in Changsha. Contact was established within days, in October 1927, by which time Shanghai had received reports about the events surrounding the Autumn Harvest Uprising. What could not have failed to emerge was that Mao had aborted the venture, and had then made off with the troops without authorization. Shanghai sent for Mao (along with others) to discuss the fiasco. Mao ignored the summons, and on 14 November he was expelled from his Party posts.

The Party made a determined effort to get rid of him. On 31 December, Shanghai told Hunan that “the Centre” considered that “the … army led by comrade Mao Tse-tung … has committed extremely serious errors politically. The Centre orders [you] to dispatch a senior comrade there, with the Resolutions [expelling Mao] … to call a congress for army comrades … to reform the Party organization there.” Clearly anticipating trouble from Mao, the message added: “assign a brave and smart worker comrade to be the Party representative.”

The banner of the Party was critical to Mao, as he had little personal magnetism. His solution to the Party order was simple: prevent the news of his expulsion from ever reaching his men.

A week after Shanghai issued its order, the entire Hunan committee was conveniently — some might say suspiciously — arrested by the Nationalists. Mao’s troops never learned that the Party had withdrawn its mandate from him. It was not until March 1928 that the first Party envoy was allowed to appear in Mao’s base, bringing the message that expelled him. But Mao outsmarted the Party by ensuring that the envoy could only deliver the message to a few hand-picked lackeys, and then pretending to submit by resigning his Party post, which he passed on to a stooge. He awarded himself a new title, Division Commander, and continued to control the army.

THIS BANDIT COUNTRY made an ideal base, well supplied with food. The mountains, though rising to only 995 meters, were steep, and gave excellent security, being ringed by precipices, with dense forests of fir and bamboo that were permanently shrouded in mist, and teemed with monkeys, wild boar, tigers and all sorts of poisonous snakes. It was easy to defend, and to get out of in an emergency, as there were hidden byways leading out to two provinces — narrow mud paths buried under masses of vegetation, impossible for strangers to spot. For outlaws, it was a safe haven.

Mao and his troops lived by staging looting sorties to neighboring counties, and sometimes farther afield. These forays were grandly called da tu-hao—literally, “smash landed tyrants.” In fact they were indiscriminate, classic bandit raids. Mao told his troops: “If the masses don’t understand what ‘landed tyrants’ means, you can tell them it means the moneyed, or ‘the rich.’ ” The term “the rich” was highly relative, and could mean a family with a couple of dozen liters of cooking oil, or a few hens. “Smash” covered a range of activities from plain robbery and ransom to killing.

These raids made frequent headlines in the press, and greatly raised Mao’s profile. It was now that he gained notoriety as a major bandit chief.

But his bandit activities garnered little support from the locals. One Red soldier recalled how hard it was to persuade the population to help them identify the rich, or to join in a raid, or even share the loot. Another described one night’s experience:

We usually surrounded the house of the landed tyrant, seizing him first and then starting to confiscate things. But this time as soon as we broke in, gongs sounded all of a sudden … and several hundred enemies [villagers] emerged … They seized over forty of our men, locked them up in the clan temple … beat them and trussed them up, the women stamping on them with their feet. Then grain barrels were put over them, with big stones on top. They were so badly tortured …

Although Mao claimed an ideological rationale — fighting the exploiting classes — the fact that his incursions were virtually indistinguishable from traditional bandit behavior remained a permanent source of discontent in his own ranks, particularly among the military commanders. In December 1927 the chief commander, Chen Hao, tried to take the troops away while on a looting expedition. Mao rushed to the scene with a posse of supporters, and had Chen arrested, and later executed in front of the entire force. Mao almost lost his army. In the space of the few months since he had snatched the force away, all its main officers had deserted him.

As a means to curry favor with the troops, Mao set up “soldiers’ committees” to satisfy their wish for a say in the proceeds of looting. At the same time, secret Party cells were formed, answering only to Mao as the Party boss. Even ranking military superiors did not know who was a member of the Party, which amounted to a secret organization. In this way Mao used the control mechanism of communism, as well as its name, to maintain his grip on the army.

But as his grip remained far from iron-clad, and he himself was certainly not popular, Mao could never relax his vigilance about his personal safety, and it was from now that he began to perfect the security measures that developed in later life into a truly awesome — if largely invisible — system. To begin with, he had about a hundred guards, and the number grew. He picked several houses in different places in bandit country, and had them fully rigged for security. The houses invariably had escape exits such as a hole in the wall, usually at the back, leading into the mountains. Later, on the Long March, even when he was on the move, most of his houses had one notable characteristic: a special exit leading to an emergency escape route.

Mao lived in style. One residence, called the Octagonal Pavilion, was of great architectural distinction. The spacious main part, opening onto a large courtyard set beside a river, had a ceiling consisting of three layers of octagonal wooden panels that spiraled into a little glass roof, like a glass-topped pagoda. It had belonged to a local doctor, who was now moved to a corner of the courtyard but continued to practice — most convenient for Mao, as he was never quite free of some ailment or other.

Another house that Mao occupied, in the big town of Longshi, was also a doctor’s, and also magnificent. It had a strange beauty that bespoke the former prosperity of the town. The enormous house was half a European masonry villa, with an elegant loggia above a row of Romanesque arches, and half a brick-and-timber Chinese mansion, with layers of upturned eaves and delicate latticed windows. The two parts were grafted together by an exquisite octagonal doorway.

Mao’s actual HQ in Longshi was a splendid two-story mansion set in 2,000 square meters of ground, once the best school for young men from three counties — until Mao came. The whole top floor was open on three sides and looked out onto a vista of rivers and clouds. It had been designed for the pupils to enjoy the breeze in the stifling days of summer. Mao’s occupation of this building was to set a pattern. Wherever he went, schools, clan temples and Catholic churches (often the sturdiest buildings in many parts of remote rural China) were commandeered. These were the only buildings large enough for meetings, apart from being the best. School classes, naturally, were shut down.

During his entire stay in the outlaw land, which lasted fifteen months, Mao ventured into the mountains only three times, for a total period of less than a month. And when he did go, he was not exactly traveling rough. When he went to call on bandit chief Zuo, he stayed in a brilliantly white mansion known as the White House, formerly owned by a Cantonese timber merchant. He was entertained lavishly, with pigs and sheep slaughtered in his honor.

The contours of Mao’s future lifestyle in power were already emerging. He had acquired a sizable personal staff, which included a manager, a cook, a cook’s help with the special duty of carrying water for Mao, a groom who looked after a small horse for his master, and secretaries. One errand boy’s “special task” was to keep him supplied with the right brand of cigarettes from Longshi. Another orderly collected newspapers and books whenever they took a town or looted a rich house.

MAO ALSO ACQUIRED a wife — his third — almost as soon as he settled in outlaw country. A pretty young woman with large eyes, high cheekbones, an almond-shaped face and a willowy figure, Gui-yuan was just turning eighteen when she met Mao. She came from the rich county of Yongxin at the foot of the mountain, and her parents, who owned a teahouse, had given her the name Gui-yuan (Gui: osmanthus, and yuan: round) because she was born on an autumn evening when a round moon shone above a blossoming osmanthus tree. She had attended a missionary school run by two Finnish ladies, but was not content with being brought up as a lady. Her restless, fiery temperament rejected the traditional claustrophobic life prescribed for women, and made her yearn for a wider world, enjoyment, and some action. So, in the stirring atmosphere of the Northern Expedition army’s entry into her town in summer 1926, she joined the Communist Party. Soon she was making speeches in public, as a cheerleader welcoming the troops. At the age of only sixteen, she was appointed head of the Women’s Department in the new government for the whole county, starting her job by cutting off her own long hair, an act that was still revolutionary and eyebrow-raising.

A year later, after Chiang Kai-shek’s split, Communists and activists were on the run, including her parents and younger sister, who had also joined the Party. Her elder brother, also a Communist, was thrown into prison, along with many others, but the outlaw Yuan was a friend of his, and helped to break him out of jail. Gui-yuan and her brother escaped with the outlaws, and she became best friends with Mrs. Yuan. Zuo, the other outlaw, who had three wives, gave her a Mauser pistol.

When Mao came, Yuan assigned her to act as his interpreter. Mao did not speak the local dialect, and he never learned it. Here, as in his later peregrinations, he had to communicate with the locals through an interpreter.

Mao at once began to court her, and by the beginning of 1928 they were “married”—with no binding ceremony but a sumptuous banquet prepared by Mrs. Yuan. This was barely four months after Mao had left Kai-hui, the mother of his three sons, the previous August. He had written to her just once, mentioning that he had foot trouble. From the time of his new marriage, he abandoned his family.

Unlike Kai-hui, who was madly in love with him, Gui-yuan married Mao with reluctance. A beautiful woman in a crowd of men, she had many suitors and considered Mao, at thirty-four, “too old” and “not worthy” of her, as she told a close friend. Mao’s youngest brother, Tse-tan, handsome and lively, also fancied Gui-yuan. “My brother has a wife,” he said. “Better to be with me.” She chose the elder Mao because she felt the “need for protection politically in that environment,” as she later conceded.

In a world of few women and a lot of sexually frustrated men, Mao’s relationship with Gui-yuan caused gossip. Mao was careful: he and Gui-yuan avoided appearing in public together. When the couple walked past the building that housed wounded soldiers, he would ask Gui-yuan to go separately.

By the end of a year of marriage, Gui-yuan had resolved to leave Mao. She confided to a friend that she was unlucky to have married him and felt she had “made a big sacrifice” by doing so. When Mao decided to leave the outlaw land, in January 1929, she tried desperately to stay behind. Gui-yuan may well have been thinking about more than just leaving Mao. She had been swept into a maelstrom while still only in her teens, and now her desire to quit was so strong that she was prepared to risk capture by the Reds’ enemies. However, Mao ordered her to be taken along “at any cost.” She cried all the way, repeatedly falling behind, only to be fetched by Mao’s guards with his horse.

MAO’S STANDING WITH the Party began to change in April 1928, when a large Red unit of thousands of men, the surviving Nanchang mutineers, the troops he had angled for right from the start, sought refuge in his base. They came to Mao as a defeated force whose much-depleted ranks had been routed on the south coast the previous October, when the Russians failed to deliver the promised arms. The remnants of the force had been rallied by a 41-year-old officer called Zhu De, a former professional soldier with the rank of brigadier, and something of a veteran among the mainly twentyish Reds. He had gone to Germany in his mid-thirties, and joined the Party before moving on to Russia for special military training. He was a cheerful man, and a soldier’s soldier, who mingled easily with the rank and file, eating and marching with them, carrying guns and backpacks like the rest, wearing straw sandals, a bamboo hat on his back. He was constantly to be found at the front.

Mao had always coveted the Nanchang mutineers, and when he first arrived in outlaw territory had sent a message urging Zhu to join him, but Zhu had declined. Shanghai’s orders had been to launch uprisings in the southeast corner of Hunan around New Year 1928, and Zhu, as a loyal Party man, had followed orders. The uprisings failed abysmally, thanks to the sheer absurdity and brutality of Moscow’s tactics. According to a report at the time, the policy was to “kill every single one of the class enemies and burn and destroy their homes.” The slogan was “Burn, burn, burn! Kill, kill, kill!” Anyone unwilling to kill and burn was termed “running dog of the gentry [who] deserves to be killed.”

In line with this policy, Zhu’s men razed two whole towns, Chenzhou and Leiyang, to the ground. The result was to foment a real uprising — against the Communists. One day, at a rally held to try to force peasants to do more burning and killing, the peasants revolted and killed the attending Communists. In village after village and town after town where Zhu’s men were active, rebellions sprang up against the Reds. Peasants slaughtered grassroots Party members, tore off the red neckerchiefs they had been ordered to wear, and donned white ones to demonstrate their allegiance to the Nationalists.

Once Nationalist troops began to apply pressure, Zhu had to run, and thousands of civilians went with him: the families of the activists who had done the burning and killing, who had nowhere else to go. This was what Moscow had intended: peasants must be coerced into doing things that left no way back into normal life. To “get them to join the revolution,” the Party had decreed, “there is only one way: use Red terror to prod them into doing things that leave them with no chance to make compromises later with the gentry and bourgeoisie.” One man from Leiyang recounted: “I had suppressed [i.e., killed] counter-revolutionaries, so I could not live peacefully now. I had to go all the way … So I burned my own house with my own hands … and left [with Zhu].”

After these people left, the cycle of revenge and retribution brought more casualties, among them a young woman who had been adopted by Mao’s mother, called Chrysanthemum Sister. She had followed Mao into the Party and married a Communist, and they had a young child. Although it seems she and her husband did not support the killings by the Reds, nevertheless her husband was executed after Zhu’s army left Leiyang, and his head exhibited in a wooden cage on the city wall. Chrysanthemum Sister was imprisoned. She wanted to recant, but her captors refused permission. She wrote to a relative that she was made to “suffer all the pains I had never imagined existed” and yearned for death: “I long to die and not go on being tortured … It would be such relief to leave this world. But my poor [baby], it’s so painful to think of him. I had so many plans about bringing him up. Never did I dream all this was going to happen … My baby must not blame me …” Chrysanthemum Sister was later executed.

Zhu came to Mao as a defeated man, while Mao could represent himself as the person who had in effect saved what was the largest detachment of Communist troops still functioning, at a time when other Red bases were crumbling. All the uprisings the Russians had ordered in the past months had ended in failure. The most famous Red base, Hailufeng, on the south coast, collapsed in late February 1928. During its two-month existence, the area, called “Little Moscow”—there was even a “Red Square,” with a gateway copied from the Kremlin — became a carnage ground under its leader Peng Pai, a man with a thirst for blood. Over 10,000 people were butchered; “reactionary villages were razed wholesale to the ground.”

These failed areas had carried out killing and burning on a much larger scale than Mao’s. Mao was not a fanatic. He would stop his men from burning down Catholic churches (which were often the best buildings in rural areas) and fine houses, telling them to keep them for their own use. Killing served its purposes, but it should not jeopardize his broader political interests.

By the time Zhu De came to Mao, Moscow had begun to stop the “aimless and disorderly pogroms and killings” which it termed, with the Communist penchant for jargon, “blind-action-ism” and “killing-and-burning-ism.” Shanghai ordered killing to be more targeted. This was exactly what Mao had been doing. He emerged as shrewd and far-sighted, and this dealt him back into the game — and into the Party’s good graces. And Stalin’s too. Even Mao’s disobedience vis-à-vis the Party now had a plus side, as Stalin badly needed a winner — someone with initiative, not just a blind subordinate. Moscow’s ability to operate in China, already weakened by Chiang Kai-shek’s policy switch in spring 1927, had been further impaired after Russian diplomats were caught red-handed in an attempted putsch in Canton (known as “the Canton Commune”) in December 1927. Some missions, including the one in Changsha, were shut down, and Moscow lost diplomatic cover for many of its operatives.

As soon as Zhu De arrived, Mao acted to retrieve his Party mandate, writing to Shanghai on 2 May demanding to form a Special Committee headed by himself. Without waiting for a reply, he had it announced at a rally to celebrate the Mao — Zhu link-up that Mao was the Party commissar — and Zhu the commander — of what was to become known as “the Zhu — Mao Red Army.” Mao then held a “Party congress” with delegates appointed by himself, and just set up the Special Committee, with himself as its head.

There was an extra reason why Mao required an urgent Party mandate. The contingent Zhu commanded was 4,000 strong, and far outnumbered Mao’s, which counted just over 1,000; moreover, half of Zhu’s men were proper soldiers, with battle experience. So Mao needed a Party mandate to secure his authority. To establish some martial credentials in the presence of Zhu’s army, Mao sported a pistol when he met them, one of the few times he was ever seen carrying one. He soon gave it back to a bodyguard. Mao believed in the gun, but he was not a battlefield man.

While waiting for endorsement from Shanghai, Mao began to behave like a good Party member, accepting Party orders and regular inspectors, and filing long reports. Till now he had not bothered to find out how many Party members there were in his territory, and had given vague — and exaggerated — answers to an inspector: this county had “over 100,” that one “over 1,000.” Now Party committees started to function.

He also began to carry out land redistribution, central to the Communist program. He had not bothered to do this before, as it was irrelevant to how he ruled, which was simply by looting.

MEANWHILE, MAO’S LETTER demanding a Party post, which, like all other correspondence, was carried by special messenger, was sent on by Shanghai to Moscow. It reached Stalin on 26 June 1928, right in the middle of the CCP’s 6th Congress, then meeting in secret just outside Moscow. That this was the only time any foreign party held a congress in Russia speaks for the exceptional importance Stalin ascribed to China, as does the fact that the Russians arranged and paid for over 100 delegates to travel clandestinely from China.

Stalin’s line was delivered by Comintern chief Nikolai Bukharin in an address that spanned nine buttock-numbing hours. Mao was not among those present. He had already adopted a tyrant’s golden rule, one to which he stuck for the rest of his life: not to step out of his lair unless he absolutely had to.

Moscow had reservations about Mao. Chou En-lai, the key figure at the Congress, said in his military report that Mao’s troops had “a partly bandit character,” meaning that Mao did not always toe the line. Yet, fundamentally, Mao was in favor with Moscow, and was cited at the Congress as a key fighting leader. The fact was that he was the most effective man in applying the Kremlin’s policy which, as Stalin reiterated to the Chinese Party leaders in person on 9 June, was to establish a Red Army. While in Russia, every delegate to the Congress received army training, and detailed military plans were drawn up. Stalin, the old bank-robber, got personally involved in the financing via a huge counterfeiting operation.

Mao fitted Stalin’s bill. He had an army — and a base — and was an old Party member. Moreover, he now had the highest profile, even if of a notorious kind, among all Chinese Communists. He was, as Stalin was later to say to the Yugoslavs, insubordinate, but a winner. And however disobedient he might be, Mao clearly needed the Party, and needed Moscow, and this made him essentially subject to control.

Mao’s demands were met in full. By November he had been told that he was in charge of the Zhu — Mao Red Army and its territory around the outlaw land. This was a key moment in his rise. He had faced down the Party — and Moscow itself.

This mutiny entered myth as a purely Chinese operation under the misleading name of “the Nanchang Uprising,” and 1 August was later designated the founding day of the Chinese Communist Army. But, as Stalin bluntly put it, the operation was “on the initiative of the Comintern, and only on its initiative.” These words were deleted from the published version of Stalin’s speech. The man in charge of delivering arms to the mutineers was Anastas Mikoyan.

One of Mao’s closest subordinates confirmed that by the time Mao turned up, “the Autumn Harvest Uprising had failed.”

One of the Russians in Shanghai told Moscow that “everything has been given over to fire and the sword and people were shot right and left.”

He praised Lenin, not inappositely, with these words: “His law has no detail. It just kills all opposition. His workers and peasants can just kill off all the landed tyrants, bad gentry, landlords, capitalists, with no need to report to anyone …” The regime called on people to “disembowel and slice off heads … slaughter on the spot with no hesitation. Have absolutely not a shred of feeling …,” “kill, kill freely. To kill is the topmost important work in an uprising.” Children were praised for “automatically killing reactionaries.”

6. SUBJUGATING THE RED ARMY SUPREMO (1928–30 AGE 34–36)

MAO RECEIVED Shanghai’s endorsement as head of the Zhu — Mao Army in November 1928, and at once began planning to leave the outlaw land with the army, to take over new domains and new armed forces. He was also leaving because the region was about to be attacked. In June that year, Chiang Kai-shek had defeated the Peking government and brought much of China under his control, setting up his capital in Nanjing. Chiang’s troops were on their way to Mao’s territory. Mao set off on 14 January 1929. The bulk of the Zhu — Mao Army, now some 3,000 strong, left with him, as did Zhu De, whom Shanghai had appointed military supremo of the army.

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.”

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.

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.”

The letter elated Mao. Far from earning him a reprimand, his violation of Party rules and sabotage of his colleagues had brought him only reward. In triumph, he lingered in the village for over a month, waiting for the pressure from Shanghai to pile on Zhu De to kowtow.

At the time, Mao had his wife, Gui-yuan, staying with him, as well as a couple of acolytes. He did not talk politics with the women, preferring to relax with them. After dinner the two couples would walk to a little bridge to enjoy the twilight over a brook lush with water-grass. When darkness fell, peasants would light pine torches at the water’s edge. Shoals of fish would converge on the beacons, and the peasants would catch them with nets, or even bare-handed. Fish heads were Mao’s favorite morsel, and were said to enhance the brain. During the day he sat by his window reading English out loud in his heavy Hunan accent, to the amusement of his friends. This stumbling performance, without really striving to progress, was a kind of relaxation for Mao.

Zhu De and his colleagues “wrote again and again urging comrade Mao to return,” as they reported to an obviously anxious Shanghai. But Mao stayed put until late November, when Zhu sent troops to escort him back formally, as a show of submission.

On 28 November Mao wrote Shanghai a letter that delighted Chou En-lai with its “very positive” spirit and declaration that Mao “completely accepts the Centre’s instructions.” But Mao’s main act of deference was reserved for Moscow. He condemned his old mentor Professor Chen as “anti-revolution,” and proposed a “propaganda drive” against him. A point was made of denouncing Trotsky by name. The troops were given daily pep talks on “armed support for the Soviet Union.”

Having subjugated Zhu, Mao kept him on as a figurehead, and let the army continue to be called the Zhu — Mao Army. This way, Mao both satisfied Moscow and Shanghai, which specifically ordered “unity,” and exploited Zhu’s high prestige among the troops. Zhu went on performing as a front-man for Mao for almost half a century until the two men died within weeks of each other in 1976.

Yet sometimes Zhu gave vent to his anger and frustration. In February 1931 he grumbled to military leaders that he was “just a plaything in Mao’s hands, he had no power, Mao just toyed with him.” This was reported to Moscow, but the Russians did not lift a finger to restrain Mao.

MAO’S RETURN TO COMMAND was announced to a big meeting of army delegates gathered in the town of Gutian in December 1929. To forestall dissent, he employed a ruse. He knew that what the soldiers hated most was the practice of executing deserters. According to a contemporary report to Shanghai, “every time before setting off, a few deserters would be executed and placed along the road as a warning to others.” Incidentally, this demonstrates how hard it was to keep people in the Red Army, contrary to oft-recycled claims. The fact was that even executions did not always work, as the report continued: “But we still can’t stop deserters.”

At Gutian, Mao made much of introducing a resolution to abolish the practice. This move was tremendously popular with the soldiers. But a few months later, when the Gutian resolutions were circulated, this item was not among them. Once Mao had established himself, it disappeared. Deserters continued to be executed.

Having inveigled the delegates at Gutian into looking more favorably on him by showing specious tolerance towards the issue of desertion, Mao was able to get what he really wanted: resolutions to condemn whatever stood between him and absolute power, notably the authority of the professional military. Mao was not a professional army man. Zhu was. So Mao invented a Soviet-style pejorative tag, “purely military viewpoint,” to lay down the line that it was wrong to place too high a value on military professionalism. He loathed the convention of voting even more, as it was a free vote that had turfed him out of office. So he labeled holding a vote as “ultra-democracy,” and abolished the practice.

Mao was addicted to comfort, while Zhu lived like an ordinary soldier. Aversion to privilege was particularly strong in the army because many had originally been attracted to join by the lure of equality, which was the Party’s main appeal. To quell any protests about privilege, Mao now invented the term “absolute egalitarianism” to designate an offense, adding the word “absolute” to make it harder for opponents to disagree. It was from this time on that privilege was formally endorsed as an inalienable part of Chinese communism.

As 1930 dawned, Mao, having just turned thirty-six, could look back on the previous year with considerable satisfaction. The Party had handed him the biggest Red Army outside the Soviet bloc after he had broken all the rules. Moscow and Shanghai were palpably bribing him, which meant they needed him. Now he could further exploit the leverage this gave him.

“Where do I go now?” asked Mao, as he set off on horseback humming a poem along mossy woodland paths. Mao knew exactly where he was going: to carry out more takeovers.

Like its Russian counterpart, it changed names many times, and we shall call this apparatus “the Chinese KGB.”

Comintern chief Bukharin called the railway zone “our revolutionary forefinger pointed into China,” and it was serving as a major base for Russian funding and sponsorship of Chinese Communists.

7. TAKEOVER LEADS TO DEATH OF SECOND WIFE (1927–30 AGE 33–36)

AFTER CHIANG KAI-SHEK established a Nationalist government based at Nanjing in 1928, with nominal authority over the whole of China, he launched a drive to weld the many different armies controlled by provincial potentates into a unified national army under his control. This met ferocious resistance from an alliance of warlords, and by the beginning of 1930 each side had deployed hundreds of thousands of troops. The resulting internecine fighting presented the CCP with a chance to expand its own army and bases.

Moscow began to consider forming a Communist state in China. Chou En-lai set off for the Soviet Union in March 1930, bringing with him a detailed report on the Chinese Red Army, saying it had some 62,700 men, made up of 13 armed groups (called “armies”) spread over 8 provinces. The Zhu — Mao Army was the best-known of these, and accounted for almost one-quarter of the total, having expanded to nearly 15,000 men, thanks to its control of a large base. Bases were the key to expanding the army, as possession of a base enabled the Reds to acquire conscripts.

While Chou En-lai was away, the man in charge in Shanghai was Mao’s fellow Hunanese and former subordinate, Li Li-san. Li-san, who had made his name as a labor organizer, was an impulsive activist and passionate advocate of further expansion. Under him, a highly ambitious plan was devised to seize a large chunk of the interior, including big cities like Nanchang and Changsha, and form a Red government in the heart of China, at Wuhan, on the Yangtze. Mao was assigned to take Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi.

Mao was a realist. He knew that even given the infighting among the Nationalists, the Red Army had no hope of seizing and holding major cities. At first he expressed reluctance to carry out the plan, but within days of voicing doubts he was bursting with zeal. He still had no faith in the project, but he realized that he could exploit Shanghai’s fantasy for his own purpose, which was to take over the second biggest Red Army branch, run by Peng De-huai.

PENG, WHO WAS five years Mao’s junior, was born in a village in Mao’s own district in Hunan. He was to rise to be Communist China’s first defense minister, and also Mao’s fiercest and bravest critic within the regime — for which he would pay with a long-drawn-out and agonizing death.

Peng had a highly expressive mouth and eyes, which seemed to show a permanent sadness. He cared about the poor and the downtrodden. Unlike most Communist leaders, he had had a poverty-stricken childhood, which scarred him profoundly. When his mother died, his youngest brother, who was six months old, had starved to death. Decades later, Peng wrote of his childhood:

In bitter winter, when other people were wearing padded clothes and shoes, my brothers and I wore straw sandals on bare feet, and clothes made of palm leaves, like primitive men … When I was ten, there was nothing at all to live on. On New Year’s Day, when rich people’s homes let off firecrackers, my family had not a grain of rice. So I took my second brother to go begging, for the first time.

He described how he fainted from hunger after they got home. Out of pride, he refused to go begging next day, so his grandmother, who was over seventy, went hobbling on bound feet, pulling along his younger brothers, one of them only three years old. Watching them disappear into the snow, Peng said later that he felt sharp knives were cutting at his heart, and he went into the mountains and chopped some firewood which he sold for a small packet of salt. That evening he would not eat the rice his grandmother’s begging had brought home, and the whole family wept.

When he was fifteen, his village was hit by drought, which brought starvation for many. Peng became involved in an attempt to force a wealthy landlord to hand out some rice, by climbing onto the roof of the landlord’s granary and removing the tiles to reveal the grain the man had denied having stored. Peng was placed on a wanted list, and had to flee. In 1916 he joined the Hunan army and became an officer. He was sometimes invited by local dignitaries to banquets where young girls barely in their teens were available for their pleasure. One girl of thirteen told Peng she had been badly beaten by a pimp because she declined to sleep with officers. Peng bought her freedom, and thereafter turned down all invitations to banquets. He became attracted to communism “to find a way out for the poor,” as he put it.

Peng secretly joined the CCP just after New Year 1928. That July he mutinied against the Nationalists, taking 800 men with him. The Party told him to make contact with Mao, who was in the outlaw land nearby at the time. Peng arrived in December, just as Mao was making ready to quit the base. Mao needed someone to stay behind to hold the fort, as possession of a base was his main asset.

So Mao grabbed Peng and told him to stay and defend the territory — a doomed task. After Mao was gone, government troops came in force. Peng’s men had to break out through deep snow, climbing over precipices and inching along tiny tracks normally used only by wild animals.

From then on, Mao continued to treat Peng as his subordinate, and Peng made no objection. But Shanghai did not formally endorse this arrangement, and Mao’s mandate did not, officially, extend beyond the Zhu — Mao Army. In early 1930, when Moscow and Shanghai reorganized all Red Army forces nationwide in preparation for establishing a Communist state, Peng’s army, which had grown at an extraordinary rate to 15,000—the same number of troops as Mao’s — was made independent of Mao. Peng’s men were excellent soldiers, with a strong esprit de corps. A Party inspector told Shanghai that Peng’s army “has the highest morale. The troops obey orders, have strong discipline and a great spirit of camaraderie, and are brave soldiers … They are very loyal to Peng De-huai personally. The wounded in the rear hospitals, once recovered, absolutely insist on returning to [Peng’s] army … It has very few deserters.”

Mao was determined to control Peng and his crack force. This was why he suddenly expressed an eagerness to attack Nanchang. If he was there, rather than down south on the Jiangxi — Fujian border, this would bring him hundreds of kilometers closer to Peng, who was nearby. Mao’s secret plan was to go and physically join forces with Peng, as this was the only way he could exert control over Peng and his army.

Mao set off north, saying he was going for Nanchang, as the Party had ordered. But when he reached the outskirts of Nanchang, at the end of July, he fired only a few shots and then moved his army towards Changsha, which Peng had just captured on 25 July.

Changsha was the only provincial capital the Reds took, and Peng held it for eleven days, proclaiming a Communist government, with his HQ in the American Bible Institute. His success rang alarm bells in Western capitals, especially Washington, which now, for the first time, registered the Chinese Communists as a serious force. One reason was the death in combat of Seaman 1st Class Samuel Elkin, the first US serviceman to die fighting Chinese Communists, killed on the USS Guam on the Xiang River by shelling from Peng’s forces en route to Changsha — on the Fourth of July. Gunboats of four foreign powers, particularly the USS Palos, played a critical role in driving Peng out of the city on 6 August.

In mid-August, Peng received a message out of the blue saying that Mao was coming to “help” him. Mao wrote simultaneously to Shanghai, on 19 August, to say that he had abandoned his assignment to attack Nanchang in order to go to Peng’s rescue, claiming that Peng was in deep trouble—“suffering considerable deaths and losses.” Peng told Mao flatly that he was not in trouble and did not need help, but this was not enough to shake off Mao, who cunningly countered by telling Peng to come and help him, as he was about to attack a town called Yonghe, located in between them, about 100 km east of Changsha.

When Peng joined up with him, on 23 August, Mao announced that Peng’s corps was now merged with his own, under his own command, leaving Peng as mere deputy military commander, under Zhu De. Mao tried to blow smoke at Shanghai (and Moscow) by claiming that the goal in merging the armies was to attack Changsha a second time — a move opposed by both Peng and Zhu De, who argued that it had no prospect of succeeding, as the element of surprise, essential to Peng’s capture of the city, had been lost.

But Mao insisted, and assured Shanghai that together the two corps could easily “occupy Changsha … then attack Wuhan … to trigger a general uprising in the whole of China.” Mao stoked Shanghai’s delusions by suggesting that the occupation of Wuhan was imminent, and with it the establishment of a Red government: “Please could the Centre instruct on taking Wuhan,” he wrote in his most ingratiating style, “and start preparations for organising a government …” In fact, Mao had no intention of going anywhere near Wuhan.

Nor did he really think he could seize Changsha. Still, to cement his absorption of Peng, he ordered Changsha to be attacked. The result was “huge human losses,” Moscow was told. These were much greater for Peng’s units than for Mao’s, as Mao had avoided a genuine strike at Changsha, whereas Peng had faithfully carried out orders and attacked the city directly The GRU chief in China, Gailis, told Moscow that “Mao just looked on.”

At the end of three weeks, Mao called off the siege, insisting that Peng’s army should move off with him. This met with resistance from Peng’s officers, and some even tried to break away. (The Chinese Red Army, like Chinese forces in general at this point, was not like a modern army where orders were obeyed unconditionally and unquestioningly.) Mao soon launched a bloody purge against them.

Mao also used the siege of Changsha, which made headlines, to promote himself to the top job, and raise his profile further. When he started the siege, on 23 August, he proclaimed an All-China Revolutionary Committee, put it in command of all Red Armies, governments and Party branches, with himself as chairman, and sent an announcement to this effect to the press.

Two months before, on 25 June, Mao had already issued two press releases giving himself this title. No newspapers seem to have carried these, but Mao pasted them up as notices. Shanghai’s reaction had been to announce on 1 August that the post of chairman belonged to the Party’s (nominal) general secretary, Hsiang Chung-fa. Mao was now reiterating his self-appointment over Hsiang’s head, in defiance of Shanghai.

But Mao received no punishment. The new Red state that Moscow had decided to install in China needed power-hungry leaders, and Mao was the hungriest around. On 20 September his second-level membership of the Politburo was restored, paving the way to top jobs in the coming Red state. Moscow had rejected Wuhan as the location, ordering the state to be established in “the Red Army’s largest secure region”—which was Red Jiangxi.

The defeat and heavy casualties inflicted by Mao’s siege of Changsha were blamed on the impulsive Li Li-san. Li-san had told the Russians it was their “internationalist duty” to send in troops to help the Chinese Reds in their fight. During the Russian invasion of Manchuria the year before, he had gladly called for the Chinese Reds to “defend the Soviet Union with arms.” Now he proposed that Moscow should reciprocate, and this riled Stalin, who suspected Li-san of trying to drag him into war with Japan. Li-san had also incurred Stalin’s ire by saying that Mongolia, which Soviet Russia had annexed from China, should become part of Red China. The Comintern condemned Li-san on 25 August for being “hostile to Bolshevism, and hostile to the Comintern,” and in October a letter arrived ordering him to Moscow. There Stalin turned him into a kind of all-purpose scapegoat, and he was repeatedly called on to stand up and denounce himself.^† Li-san entered history books as the man responsible for all the Red losses in the early 1930s. High on the list of losses were those suffered during the siege of Changsha, which were in fact entirely Mao’s responsibility, incurred for his own personal power.

MAO’S QUEST FOR POWER also brought tragedy to his family. In 1930 his ex-wife Kai-hui and their three young sons, the youngest three years old, were still living in her family home on the outskirts of Changsha when Mao laid siege to the city.

Mao had left them exactly three years before, when he set off, ostensibly to take part in an “Autumn Harvest Uprising,” but actually to poach his first armed force. Barely four months after his departure, he had married somebody else.

Although Changsha was ruled by a fiercely anti-Communist general, Ho Chien, Kai-hui had been left alone, as she was not engaged in Communist activities. Even after Peng De-huai had taken Changsha and nearly killed him, Ho Chien took no reprisals against her. But after Mao turned up and subjected the city to a second lengthy assault, the Nationalist general decided to take revenge. Kai-hui was arrested together with her eldest son, An-ying, on An-ying’s eighth birthday, 24 October. She was offered a deal: her freedom if she would make a public announcement divorcing Mao and denouncing him. She refused, and was executed on the cloudy morning of 14 November 1930. Next day the Hunan Republican Daily reported her death under the headline “Wife of Mao Tse-tung executed yesterday — everyone claps and shouts with satisfaction.” This undoubtedly reflected more loathing of Mao than of Kai-hui.

When Kai-hui was brought into the “court” in army HQ, wearing a long dark blue gown, she showed no sign of fear. There on a desk were placed a brush, some red ink, and a sticker with her name on it. After asking a few questions, the judge ticked the sticker with the brush dipped in the red ink, and threw it on the floor. This was the traditional equivalent of signing a death warrant. At this, two executioners peeled off her gown as spoils. Another found a bonus—2.5 yuan wrapped in a handkerchief in one of the pockets.

And so she went to her death, on a winter day, wearing a thin blouse, at the age of twenty-nine. As she was taken through the streets, tied up with ropes, which was the normal treatment for someone about to be executed, an officer hailed a rickshaw for her, while soldiers ran along on both sides. The execution ground lay just beyond one of the city gates, among the graves of the people executed who had no one to take their bodies home. After they shot her, some of the firing squad took off her shoes and threw them as far as they could: otherwise, legend went, they would be followed home and haunted by the ghost of the dead.

As the executioners were having lunch afterwards at their barracks, they were told that Kai-hui was not dead, so seven of them went back and finished her off. In her agony her fingers had dug deep into the earth.

Her body was taken back to her village by relatives, and buried in the grounds of her family home. Her son was released, and early in 1931 Mao’s brother Tse-min arranged for the three boys to travel to Shanghai, where they entered a secret CCP kindergarten.

When Mao learned of Kai-hui’s death, he wrote in what seems to have been genuine grief: “The death of Kai-hui cannot be redeemed by a hundred deaths of mine!” He spoke of her often, especially in his old age, as the love of his life. What he never knew is that although Kai-hui did love him, she had also rejected his ideology and his killings.

IN THE YEARS between Mao deserting her and her death, Kai-hui wrote reflections on communism, and on her love for Mao, in eight intense, forgiving and occasionally reproachful pieces, which she concealed in her house. Seven were discovered in cracks in the walls in 1982, during some renovation work. The eighth came to light under a beam just outside her bedroom during repairs in 1990. She had wrapped them up in wax paper to protect them from damp. Mao never saw them, and most are still kept secret — so secret that even Mao’s surviving family were barred from seeing the most devastating passages.

The writings show the pain Kai-hui suffered from Mao’s desertion, her disappointment and bitterness at his heartlessness towards her and their sons — and, perhaps more damning, her loss of faith in communism.

The earliest piece is a poem, “Thoughts,” dated October 1928. Mao had been gone for a year, and had only written once. He had mentioned having trouble with his feet. In June, when a CCP inspector she referred to as “First Cousin” went off to Mao’s area, she gave him a jug of chili with fermented beans, Mao’s favorite dish, to take to her husband. But there was no reply. On a cold day, Kai-hui missed Mao:

Downcast day a north wind starts,

Thick chill seeps through flesh and bones.

Thinking of this Far-away Man,

Suddenly waves churn out of calm.

Is the foot trouble healed?

Is the winter clothing ready?

Who cares for you while you sleep alone?

Are you as lonely and sad as I am?

No letters are coming through,

I ask, but no one answers.

How I wish I had wings,

Fly to see this man.

Unable to see him,

Sorrow, it has no end …

The next piece, written to First Cousin in March 1929, and marked “not sent,” talks about her loneliness and her yearning for support:

I cower in a corner of the world. I am frightened and lonely. In this situation, I search every minute for something to lean on. So you take a place in my heart, and so does Ren-xiu who is staying here — you both stand side by side in my heart! I often pray: “Please don’t let these few people be scattered!” I seem to have seen the God of Death — ah, its cruel and severe face! Talking of death, I do not really fear it, and I can say that I welcome it. But my mother, and my children! I feel pity for them! This feeling haunts me so badly — the night before last it kept me half awake all night long.

Worrying about her children, and clearly feeling she could not count on Mao, Kai-hui wrote to her First Cousin:

I decided to entrust them — my children — to you. Financially, as long as their uncle [probably Mao’s brother Tse-min] lives, he will not abandon them; and their uncle really loves them deeply. But if they lose their mother, and a father, then just the love of an uncle is not enough. They need you and many others’ love for them to grow naturally as if in a warm spring, and not be destroyed by violent storms. This letter is like a will now, and you must think I am mad. But I don’t know why, I just can’t shake off the feeling over my head of a rope like a poisonous snake, that seems to have flown in from Death, and that binds me tightly. So I cannot but prepare!..

Kai-hui had this premonition because on the 7th of that month the Hunan Republican Daily reported that Zhu De’s wife had been killed and her head exposed in a street in Changsha. The paper carried two articles in which the writers said how much they enjoyed seeing the severed head. In April, Kai-hui wrote down some thoughts which she wanted to send to a newspaper but did not, entitled: “Feeling of Sadness on Reading about the Enjoyment of a Human Head”:

Zhu De’s wife I think most likely was a Communist. [words missing from original] Or even an important figure. If so, her execution is perhaps not to be criticised. [words crossed out] And yet her killing was not due to her own crime. Those who enjoyed her head and thought it was a pleasurable sight also did so not because of her own crime. So I remember the stories of killing relatives to the ninth clan for one man’s crime in the early Manchu period. My idea that killers are forced into killing turns out not to make sense here. There are so many people so exultantly enjoying it that we can see glad articles representing them in newspapers and journals. So my idea that only a small number of cruel people kills turns out not to be true here. So I have found the spirit of our times …

Yet I am weak, I am afraid of being killed, and so afraid of killing. I am not in tune with the times. I can’t look at that head, and my breast is filled with misery … I had thought that today’s mankind, and part of mankind, the Chinese, were civilized enough to have almost abolished the death penalty! I did not expect to see with my own eyes the killing of relatives to the ninth clan for one man’s crime … (To kill the wife of Zhu De, although not quite the ninth clan, basically comes to this.) … and the human head is becoming a work of art needed by many!

The abolition of the death penalty, and of torture, had been a very popular aim earlier in the century, and the Chinese Communist Party’s charter of 1923 had included these among its goals.

Kai-hui had naturally been reading about Mao’s own killings in the newspapers. He and his troops were always called “bandits,” who “burned and killed and kidnapped and looted.” Newspapers had also reported that Mao had been driven out of the outlaw land and “surrounded on three sides, Zhu — Mao will have no chance whatever to survive.”

Kai-hui still loved Mao, and above all wanted him to give up what he was doing and come back. On 16 May 1929, in a poem marked “To First Cousin — not sent,” she wrote eight agonized lines imploring Mao’s return:

You are now the beloved sweetheart!

Please tell him: Return, return.

I can see the heart of the old [probably referring to her mother] is being burnt by fire,

Please return! Return!

Sad separation, its crystallisation, chilling misery and loneliness are looming ever larger,

How I wish you would bring home some news!

This heart, [unclear in original], how does it compare with burning by fire?

Please return! Return!

Soon after this, a letter came from her First Cousin, saying that Mao was going to Shanghai (the Party had ordered him there on 7 February 1929). This meant she might be able to see him, and Kai-hui was rapturous. She opened her next letter, “to First Cousin,” with: “Received your letter. How happy and relieved I am!” She dreamed:

If the financial situation allows, I must get out of here to do a few years’ study … I want to get out, and find a job … I’m really in a great hurry to do some studies … Otherwise I can only feel the pains of emptiness, and feel I have nothing to lean on.

That letter like a will, I didn’t send. If you can come home once, that would be all I dare to hope.

Her thoughts then reverted to Mao, the possibility that he might not go to Shanghai, and his safety if he did:

Probably he wouldn’t be able to go to Shanghai? I’d rather he didn’t go. I’m worried for him again now. Oh, heaven! I’ll stop here …

She started to write to Mao, but changed her mind. There was a heading “To my beloved — not sent,” and the rest was torn out. Instead, she wrote down the story of her life, which she finished on 20 June 1929. Clearly, this was her way of telling Mao about herself, her thoughts and feelings. The memoir told two things: how passionately she loved him, and how utterly unable she was to tolerate violence and cruelty. The latter theme seems to have assumed an even larger place in her mind, as she began and ended her narrative with it.

She recalled that at the age of six, she began to see the world as a sad place:

I was born extremely weak, and would faint when I started crying … At the time, I sympathised with animals … Every night going to bed, horrible shadows such as the killing of chickens, of pigs, people dying, churned up and down in my head. That was so painful! I can still remember that taste vividly. My brother, not only my brother but many other children, I just couldn’t understand them at all. How was it they could bring themselves to catch little mice, or dragonflies, and play with them, treating them entirely as creatures foreign to pain?

If it were not to spare my mother the pain — the pain of seeing me die — if it were not for this powerful hold, then I simply would not have lived on.

I really wanted to have a faith!..

I sympathized with people in the lower ranks of life. I hated those who wore luxurious clothes, who only thought of their own pleasure. In summer I looked just like people from lower ranks, wearing a baggy rough cotton top. This was me at about seventeen or eighteen …

She wrote about how she fell in love with Mao, how totally she loved him, how she learned about his infidelities, and how she forgave him (these pages are in chapter 3). But at the end she showed that she was thinking of breaking away from him and the ideology to which he had introduced her:

Now my inclination has shifted into a new phase. I want to get some nourishment by seeking knowledge, to water and give sustenance to my dried-up life … Perhaps one day I will cry out: my ideas in the past were wrong!

She ended her memoir with:

Ah! Kill, kill, kill! All I hear is this sound in my ears! Why are human beings so evil? Why so cruel? Why?! I cannot think on! [words brushed out by her] I must have a faith! I must have a faith! Let me have a faith!!

Kai-hui had been drawn to communism out of sympathy for the deprived. Her crying out for “a faith” says unmistakably that she was losing her existing faith, communism. She did not condemn Mao, whom she still deeply loved. But she was letting him know how strongly she felt about the killing, something she had hated since childhood.

She wrote this piece primarily for Mao, thinking she might be able to see him in Shanghai. But as time wore on, it became clear that she would not, and in fact he was studiously avoiding the city. Kai-hui hid what she had written so far, twelve pages, between bricks in a wall.

It was in a mood of despair that she wrote her last piece on 28 January 1930, two days before the Chinese New Year, traditionally the time for family reunion. Four pages long, it described what she had been through in the past two and a half years since Mao left. She began by recalling her feelings in the days just after he went:

For days I’ve been unable to sleep.

I just can’t sleep. I’m going mad.

So many days now, he hasn’t written. I’m waiting day after day.

Tears …

I mustn’t be so miserable. The children are miserable with me, and Mother is miserable with me.

I think I may be pregnant again.

Really so wretched, so lonely, so much anguish.

I want to flee. But I have these children, how can I?

On the morning of the fiftieth day, I received the priceless letter.

Even if he dies, my tears are going to shroud his corpse.

A month, another month, half a year, a year, and three years. He has abandoned me. The past churns up in my mind scene after scene. The future I envisage also churns in my mind scene after scene. He must have abandoned me.

He is very lucky, to have my love. I truly love him so very much!

He can’t have abandoned me. He must have his reasons not to write …

Father love is really a riddle. Does he not miss his children? I can’t understand him.

This is a sad thing, but also a good thing, because I can now be an independent person.

I want to kiss him a hundred times, his eyes, his mouth, his cheeks, his neck, his head. He is my man. He belongs to me.

Only Mother Love can be relied on. I’m thinking about my mother …

Yesterday, I mentioned him to my brother. I tried to look normal, but tears fell, I don’t know how.

If only I can forget him. But his beautiful image, his beautiful image.

Dimly I seem to see him standing there, gazing at me with melancholy.

I have written to First Cousin, saying this: “Whoever takes my letter to him, and brings his letter to me, is my Saviour.”

Heaven, I can’t help worrying about him.

As long as he is well, whether or not he belongs to me is secondary. May heaven protect him.

Today is his birthday. I can’t forget him. So I quietly had some food bought, and made bowls of noodles [a special birthday meal, since long noodles symbolise long life]. Mother remembers this date, too. At night in bed, I think sad thoughts to myself.

I hear he has been ill, and it comes from overwork … Without me beside him, he will not be careful. He will simply tire himself to death.

His health is really such that he can’t work. He racks his brains too much. Heaven protect me. I must work hard, hard. If I can make 60 yuan a month, I can call him back, and ask him not to work any more. In that case, with his ability, his intelligence, he may even achieve immortal success.

Another sleepless night.

I can’t endure this now. I am going to him.

My children, my poor children hold me back.

A heavy load hangs on my heart, one side is him, the other is my children. I can’t leave either.

I want to cry. I really want to cry.

No matter how hard I try, I just can’t stop loving him. I just can’t …

A person’s feeling is really strange. San Chun-he loves me so much, and yet I don’t even look at him.

How I love him [Mao]! Heaven, give me a perfect answer!

Shortly after these heart-rending words were written, her First Cousin was arrested and executed. He was buried behind her house.

Months later, she herself was dead. During his assault on Changsha, Mao made no effort to extricate her and their sons, or even to warn her. And he could easily have saved her: her house was on his route to the city, and Mao was there for three weeks. Yet he did not lift a finger.

What we call “Red Jiangxi” does not include the base in northeast Jiangxi under Fang Zhi-min.

^† One day, a Chinese was present at a talk in Moscow by a man who denounced Li Li-san ferociously. Afterwards he asked the speaker who he was, and was astonished to get the answer, “I am Li Li-san.” In February 1938 Li-san was arrested, and he spent nearly two years in prison.

One of the people kidnapped by Mao’s force was an American Catholic priest, Father Edward Young, whom the Reds tried to ransom for $20,000. Young escaped. His Chinese fellow hostages and prisoners were killed.

The following words were mostly recalled from memory after reading this document in an archive, and some may therefore not be exact. Ellipses represent parts that cannot be recalled; most other punctuation has been added for clarity.

8. BLOODY PURGE PAVES THE WAY FOR “CHAIRMAN MAO” (1929–31 AGE 35–37)

IN THE YEAR and a half since leaving the outlaw land at the beginning of 1929, Mao had seized total control over two major Red Armies, the Zhu — Mao Army and Peng De-huai’s, as well as one significant Red base, in Fujian. All along, he had also had another sizeable Red Army in his sights, this one in Jiangxi, the province between Fujian and Hunan.

Under a charismatic and relatively moderate leader called Lee Wen-lin, the Jiangxi Reds had carved out some quite secure pockets. They had been warm hosts to Mao when he had first descended on them straight from the outlaw land in February 1929. That stay had been brief, with Nationalist troops hot on Mao’s heels, but he had nonetheless promptly declared himself their boss, and when he departed had left behind his youngest brother, Tse-tan, as chief of Donggu District, the Jiangxi Reds’ center. Neither move was authorized by Shanghai, and the locals were not happy. But they did not resist Mao, as he was leaving.

Mao expected his brother to seize control for him, but Tse-tan lacked Mao’s aggressiveness and lust for power. A Party inspector described him as “working like someone suffering from malaria, suddenly hot and suddenly cold … rather childish, and afraid of making decisions.” So three months later Mao sent over a Hunanese crony, Lieu Shi-qi, with authority over his brother.

Lieu took away from Tse-tan not just his position but also his girlfriend, whom he himself married. The woman in question, Ho Yi, was the sister of Mao’s wife, Gui-yuan, so Lieu became Mao’s brother-in-law. Like Mao he was “foul-tempered and foul-mouthed,” according to his comrades, with as much elbow, and as few scruples, as Mao. By the time Mao returned to Red Jiangxi to try to consolidate his hold on it, in February 1930, Lieu had strong-armed himself into several leading posts.

Mao returned because he now had the military force to make a grab for power in Jiangxi, but once again he did so by chicanery. A grandly termed “joint conference,” supposedly comprising representatives of all the Reds in Jiangxi, was convened at a place called Pitou. Then at the last minute Mao juggled the timetable. Having announced that the conference was to open on the 10th of February, he suddenly advanced it to the 6th, so by the time key delegates arrived, including many locals who had been resisting Lieu’s power-grab, the conference was over.

The Pitou “joint conference” was in fact little more than a family affair between the two brothers-in-law, and it duly gave Mao the endorsement to be the overlord of Red Jiangxi, with Lieu as his man on the spot. The leader of the Jiangxi Reds, Lee Wen-lin, was demoted to a lowly office job.

Most Jiangxi Reds opposed these decisions, and Mao had to resort to terror to silence them. At Pitou he ordered the public execution of four well-known local Communists who were charged with being “counter-revolutionaries.” These were the first Communists murdered by Mao whose names are known.

Mao and Brother-in-law Lieu used executions to scare off potential dissenters. One Party inspector reported at the time that Lieu constantly “burst out with wild abuse … saying things like ‘I’ll have you executed!’ ” One particular charge used to send victims to their death was a phrase in vogue in Stalin’s Russia — that the subject was a “rich peasant,” or “kulak.” Mao claimed that in Jiangxi, “Party organisations on all levels are filled with landlords and kulaks,” on the sole ground that most Jiangxi Red leaders came from affluent families. In fact, Mao himself belonged to a “kulak” family.

The Chinese Communists had killed one another before, but hitherto most killings seem to have been settling clan or personal scores, using ideological labels. Mao’s killings were in order to further grander ambitions.

WHILE MAO WAS muscling in on Jiangxi, he did his utmost not to alert Shanghai, which had granted him no mandate to take over the Jiangxi Reds. On the contrary, it gave the Jiangxi Red Army the status of a separate army, on a par with the Zhu — Mao Army, and appointed a man called Cai Shen-xi as its commander.

When Cai arrived in Jiangxi, Mao refused to let him take up his post, and simply appointed his own brother-in-law Lieu to head the Jiangxi Army. Mao was able to conceal this from Shanghai because there was no telephone, radio or telegraph communication at the time. The only links were couriers, who took several weeks each way between Shanghai and the base. We have reason to believe that he and his brother-in-law Lieu murdered one uncooperative Party inspector called Jiang Han-bo, and then faked a report to Shanghai in Jiang’s name spouting Mao’s line.

Mao’s plan was to create a fait accompli. Till now he had been writing regular servile letters to Shanghai. Now he stopped completely, and he ignored repeated summonses to go to Shanghai. To get Shanghai off his back it seems he even went so far as to spread a rumor that he had died of an illness. As Mao was a famous “bandit chief,” the news received wide coverage in the Nationalist press, which was a convenient way to float a story for which he could plausibly disown responsibility.

The ploy was a success, in the short term. On 20 March an obituary framed in black appeared in Moscow in the Comintern magazine International Press Correspondence: “News has arrived from China that Comrade Mau Tze Dung … the founder of the Red Army, has died at the front in Fukien as a result of long-standing disease of the lungs.”

But within a fortnight, Moscow and Shanghai discovered that Mao was alive and kicking, and furthermore had seized control of the Jiangxi Army. On 3 April, Shanghai issued a sharp circular to all Red Armies telling them that they must obey no one but Shanghai. The circular made a point of criticizing Mao (without naming him) for taking over the Jiangxi Red Army without authorization.

When Shanghai’s document reached Jiangxi, the local Reds rose up against Mao in May. In some areas, cadres encouraged revolts by the peasants against the Mao — Lieu regime. Before Mao came, the Jiangxi Reds had paid attention to issues such as welfare and production, building a factory to make farm implements and household utensils. Mao and Lieu condemned these programs as “constructionism.” Lieu wrote that: “for the need of struggle, reducing production is unavoidable.” Deprived of the chance to raise output, and squeezed dry by taxes (which Lieu claimed they “jumped up with joy to pay”), the peasants rebelled in district after district, raising slogans like “Give us a quiet life and quiet work!” Lieu crushed the revolts mercilessly: “As soon as anyone is spotted wavering or misbehaving, they are to be arrested,” he ordered. “There must be no feelings for relatives or friends. Anyone who comes to your home or anywhere else who does not behave correctly … you must report … to the authorities so they can be seized and punished …”

Lieu claimed that the revolts were led by “AB elements [who] have become Party branch secretaries.” “AB,” standing for Anti-Bolshevik, was the name of a defunct Nationalist group, which Lieu spuriously resuscitated to condemn local dissenters. Within a month, thousands of peasants and Communists had been killed.

At this moment, an opportunity opened up for the Jiangxi Reds. At the beginning of August 1930, Mao and his army were hundreds of kilometers away, near Changsha, trying to take over Peng De-huai’s army. The Jiangxi Reds, led by their old chief Lee Wen-lin, seized the chance, convened a meeting and fired Lieu. A boisterous audience booed and barracked Lieu — and through him Mao — for “only thinking about power,” as Lieu later admitted to Shanghai, “becoming warlords” and “putting the Party in great danger.” Lieu was denounced for executing “too many” of their comrades, and for creating “an immense Red terror.”

The locals called on Shanghai to expel Lieu from the Party. But, lacking killer instinct, they let him go to Shanghai, which gave him a post in another Red base. There he met his match. The boss there, Chang Kuo-tao, was as baleful as Mao himself, and did his own slaughtering, during which Lieu was killed. After Lieu left, his wife, Mao’s sister-in-law Ho Yi, went back to Mao’s brother Tse-tan.

With the sacking of Lieu, Mao had lost his man in Jiangxi. After he wound up the siege of Changsha, he returned to Jiangxi to reassert control — and take revenge. En route, on 14 October, he denounced the Jiangxi Reds to Shanghai: “The entire Party [there] is under the leadership of kulaks … filled with AB … Without a thorough purge of the kulak leaders and of AB … there is no way the Party can be saved …”

It was just at this time that Mao learned that Moscow had given him the ultimate promotion — making him head of the future state. His aggressive pursuit of power had won him appreciation. Now that he had Moscow’s blessing, Mao decided to embark on a large-scale purge, get rid of all who had opposed him, and in the process generate such terror that no one would dare disobey him from now on. Shanghai was in no position to restrain him, as in mid-November a fierce power struggle broke out there among the leadership, brought about by a relative unknown called Wang Ming, who in future years would be a major challenger of Mao’s.

IN LATE NOVEMBER, Mao started his slaughter. He ordered all the troops to gather in the center of the Red territory, where it was hard to escape. There, he claimed that an AB League had been uncovered in the branch under Peng De-huai — which in fact contained people who had resisted being taken over by Mao. Arrests and executions began. One interrogator wrote in his unpublished memoirs how an officer who had led an attempt to leave Mao’s fold was tortured: “the wounds on his back were like scales on a fish.”

Mao had a score to settle with the Zhu — Mao Army too, since it had voted him out as its chief the year before. Quite a lot of Red Army officers had reservations about Mao, evinced in what an officer called Liou Di wrote to Shanghai on 11 January 1931: “I never trusted Mao,” he wrote. After one battle, “I met many officers in different army units … They were all very uneasy, and looked dejected. They said they did not know working in the Communist Party required them to learn sycophancy, and that it was really not worth it. I felt the same, and considered that the Bolshevik spirit of the Party was being sapped day by day …” Mao was accused of “the crime of framing and persecuting comrades,” and of “being a wicked schemer,” as he admitted to Shanghai on 20 December 1930.

To run the purge, Mao used a crony called Lie Shau-joe, deemed by his comrades to be “vicious and dirty.” “Lie is disliked by most of the troops,” one Party inspector had written, “because he is all bravado haranguing the men before a battle, but cowardly in battle.” People working under him had been begging the Party to “fire him and punish him.”

Lie proceeded by first arresting a few people, and then using torture to get them to name others; then came more arrests, more torture, and more of Mao’s foes scooped up. According to a senior officer, Lie and his men would “simply announce ‘You have AB among you,’ and would name people … no other evidence at all; these people … were tortured and forced to admit [they were AB], and also to give the names of a dozen or so other people. So those other people were arrested and tortured and they gave scores more names …”

Mao wrote to Shanghai himself on 20 December that in the space of one month “over 4,400 AB have been uncovered in the Red Army.” Most were killed — and all were tortured, Mao acknowledged. He argued that if victims were unable to stand torture and made false confessions, that itself proved they were guilty. “How could loyal revolutionaries possibly make false confessions to incriminate other comrades?” he asked.

Once he had tightened his grip on the army, Mao turned his attention to the Jiangxi Communists. On 3 December he sent Lie with a list of his foes to the town of Futian, where the Jiangxi leaders were living. Mao condemned the meeting in August which had expelled his ally Lieu as an “AB meeting” which “opposed Mao Tse-tung.” “Put them all down,” he ordered, and then “slaughter en masse in all counties and all districts.” “Any place that does not arrest and slaughter, members of the Party and government of that area must be AB, and you can simply seize and deal with them [xun-ban, implying torture and/or liquidation].”

Lie arrived at Futian on 7 December, arrested the men on Mao’s list and tortured them through the night. One method was called “striking landmines,” which slowly broke the thumb with excruciating pain. Another technique, also slow, so as to maximize the pain, was to burn victims with flaming wicks. Lie was particularly vicious towards the wives of the Jiangxi leaders. They were stripped naked and, according to a protest written immediately afterwards, “their bodies, particularly their vaginas, were burned with flaming wicks, and their breasts were cut with small knives.”

These atrocities ignited a mutiny, the first ever openly to challenge Mao. It was led by the above-mentioned senior officer, Liou Di, who actually came from Hunan and had known Mao for some years. Because of his Hunan origins, Mao had earlier wanted to enlist him on his side to help control part of the Jiangxi Army. Mao’s man Lie summoned Liou Di on 9 December, first claiming that he had been identified as AB, then promising to let him off the hook if he would collaborate.

In a letter to Shanghai after the revolt, Liou Di described what happened. He saw the torturers tucking in at a banquet of “drinks, meats and hams,” with their victims laid out at their feet, and heard Lie brag about his torturing “cheerfully, in high spirits,” to flattering noises from the others. Carried away, Lie let slip that the whole thing “was not a question of AB, but all politics.” “I arrived at the firm conclusion that all this had nothing to do with AB,” Liou wrote. “It must be Mao Tse-tung playing base tricks and sending his running dog Lie Shau-joe here to slaughter the Jiangxi comrades.”

Liou Di decided to try to stop Mao, but he had to employ subterfuge: “if I were to act as a Communist and deal with them honestly, only death would await me. So I shed my integrity … and switched to a Changsha accent [to assert his non-Jiangxi identity], and told Lie: ‘I’m an old subordinate of Your Honor … I will do my best to obey your political instructions.’ ” He also pledged allegiance to Mao. “After I said this,” he wrote, “their attitude changed straight away … They told me to wait in a small room next door …” Lying there in bed that night, with the screams of a tortured comrade coming through the wall, Liou Di planned his moves.

Next morning, he stepped up his flattery of Lie, and managed to gain his freedom. Lie told him to go back and “eliminate all the AB in your regiment at once.” When he got back, Liou Di told his fellow officers what he had seen and heard, and obtained their support. On the morning of the 12th, he gathered his troops, raided the prison at Futian and released the victims. Not being a killer, he did not pursue Mao’s cronies, all of whom, including Lie, got away. Lie, though, was later killed by an avenger.

That night, posters went up in Futian saying “Down with Mao Tse-tung!” and the next morning an anti-Mao rally was held. In the afternoon the Jiangxi men left town and moved across the River Gan to put themselves out of Mao’s reach. They sent out a circular with this description of Mao:

He is extremely devious and sly, selfish, and full of megalomania. To his comrades, he orders them around, frightens them with charges of crimes, and victimises them. He rarely holds discussions about Party matters … Whenever he expresses a view, everyone must agree, otherwise he uses the Party organisation to clamp down on you, or invents some trumped-up theories to make life absolutely dreadful for you … Mao always uses political accusations to strike at comrades. His customary method regarding cadres is to … use them as his personal tools. To sum up … not only is he not a revolutionary leader, he is not a … Bolshevik.

Mao’s goal, they said, was to “become Party Emperor.”

However, an envoy from Shanghai happened to be present, and told them to stop denouncing Mao in public, on the grounds that Mao had “an international reputation.” They obeyed at once, and entrusted their fate to Shanghai: “We must report Mao Tse-tung’s evil designs and his slaughter of the Jiangxi Party to the Centre, for the Centre to resolve it,” they told their troops.

The delegates they sent to Shanghai were all people who had been tortured by Mao’s men. There they presented the Party leadership with evidence hard to impugn — their torture scars. Moreover, they said, Mao “did not carry out the [leadership’s repeated] instructions. He … has ignored comrades sent by the Centre and deliberately created problems for them … The Centre wrote several times to try to transfer Mao Tse-tung, but he simply ignored the letters.”

But Moscow’s envoys and the Shanghai leadership, headed by Chou En-lai, backed Mao, even though they knew the charges against him were true, and had seen the marks of torture at first hand. Chou himself told Moscow’s man, the Pole Rylsky, that “the arrests and torture of members of our Party … did in fact take place.” But in the Stalinist world, a purger was always the victor, as Moscow was looking out for the hardest people. The Jiangxi Reds, though loyal to the Party, were labeled “counter-revolutionaries” and ordered to submit to Mao or face “ruthless armed struggle,” i.e., annihilation. Mao was “fundamentally correct,” Moscow said, adding that “this line of ruthless struggle against the enemies of the revolution must [be continued].” This was another milestone for Mao: he had won backing from Moscow for murdering his fellow Party members, who had done absolutely nothing wrong vis-à-vis their Party. They had not killed or wounded a single Party member, while Mao had trampled all over the Party’s rules.

Shanghai even sent the victims’ appeals against Mao back to him — a signal to Mao that he was at liberty to punish them in whatever way he desired. On these heart-rending reports, a spidery hand minuted the words: “After translation [into Russian], return to Mao.” Or, simply: “To Mao.” These words were in the hand of the head of the Organization Department, Kang Sheng. A lean, mustachioed man with gold-rimmed spectacles, a connoisseur of Chinese art and erotica, with an equally discerning eye for the range of pain produced by torture and torment, Kang was later to achieve infamy as Mao’s persecutor designate. Now, with these indifferent yet sinister words, he consigned the victims to Mao — and certain death.

With this encouragement from Shanghai, Mao had Liou Di and his fellow mutineers “tried” and executed. Before they died, they were paraded round the Red area as a deterrent to the locals. Representatives from all over the base were brought to watch the executions as a lesson.

Red Jiangxi was ravaged, as a later secret report revealed: “All work was stopped in order to slaughter AB.” “Everyone lived in fear … At the fiercest, two people talking together would be suspected of being AB … All those who were not demonic in striking AB were treated as AB …” Appalling torture was commonplace: “There were so many kinds … with strange names like … ‘sitting in a pleasure chair,’ ‘toads drinking,’ ‘monkeys holding a rope.’ Some had a red-hot gun-rod rammed into the anus … In Victory County alone, there were 120 kinds of torture.” In one, termed with sick inventiveness “angel plucking zither,” a wire was run through the penis and hung on the ear of the victim, and the torturer then plucked at the wire. There were also horrible forms of killing. “In all counties,” the report said, “there were cases of cutting open the stomach and scooping out the heart.”

Altogether, tens of thousands died in Jiangxi. In the army alone, there were about 10,000 deaths — about a quarter of the entire Red Army under Mao at the time — as revealed by the secret report immediately afterwards. It was the first large-scale purge in the Party, and took place well before Stalin’s Great Purge. This critical episode — in many ways the formative moment of Maoism — is still covered up to this day. Mao’s personal responsibility and motives, and his extreme brutality, remain a taboo.

Next door in Fujian, the local Reds had also rebelled against Mao, voting out his followers in July 1930 while he and his army were away. Many thousands were now executed; the figure, just taking those whose names are known and who were later officially cleared, is 6,352. In one county the victims were hauled through the streets to their execution with rusty wires through their testicles. Frightened and thoroughly disillusioned, the head of Red Fujian fled at the first opportunity, when he was sent to Hong Kong to buy medicine. He was only one of many senior Communists who deserted. Another was Peng De-huai’s de facto adopted son.

JUST AFTER THE mutiny against Mao, the Jiangxi Communists had appealed for support to Zhu De and Peng. “Comrades,” they pleaded, “is our Party going to be for ever so black and lightless?” These two had no love for Mao. One night after a good deal of rice wine, Zhu remarked to an old friend: “Many old comrades … have been killed in the purge. The man behind their killing is you know who.” The friend knew he meant Mao and said so in his memoirs. Then he quoted Zhu saying: “The Futian incident was also entirely caused by old Mao slaughtering AB. So many comrades have been killed …” Zhu “looked immensely sad.” However, he and Peng stuck with Mao. Shanghai and Moscow were behind Mao, and siding with the Jiangxi Reds would mean cutting themselves off from the Party. Mao had laid the groundwork for framing Zhu and Peng. He had been purging Zhu De’s staff, and had had two of Zhu’s five aides-de-camp executed. Nor would it be difficult for Mao to coerce some torture victim to make accusations against Zhu — and Peng. One message had reached Russia’s military intelligence chief in China suggesting that “Peng might be mixed up” in AB.

Not only did Mao blackmail the military commanders, he made sure they had the blood of their comrades on their hands. He ordered Zhu to sit on the panel that sentenced Liou Di to death.

Zhu and Peng did not stand up to Mao for another reason. At this time, in December 1930, Chiang Kai-shek had just won the war against his Nationalist rivals, and was launching an “annihilation expedition” against the Communists. Zhu and Peng cared about the Red Army, and feared that a split would doom it. Their attitude differed from Mao’s. During this and subsequent attacks by Chiang in 1931, Mao never halted the purge, and when the Generalissimo paused, Mao redoubled his internecine killings — even though the people he was killing had just been fighting Chiang at the front.

MAO’S RUTHLESSNESS PRODUCED an effective policy against Chiang. This was to “lure the enemy deep into the Red area and strike when it is exhausted.” Mao argued that as the Nationalists were not familiar with the terrain, the conditions must favor the Reds. Because there were so few roads, Nationalist troops would have to rely on local supplies, and since the Reds could control the population they could deprive the enemy of food and water. Mao’s plan was to force the entire population to bury their food and household goods, block every well with huge stones, and evacuate to the mountains so that Chiang’s army could not find water or food, or laborers and guides. The strategy turned the Reds’ base into a battlefield, imposing colossal hardships on the entire population, whom Mao forced into harm’s way.

Few Red leaders agreed with Mao, but his strategy worked. A Nationalist commander later lamented that everywhere “we saw no people, the houses were cleaned out as if by floods, there was no food, no woks, no pots … We couldn’t get any military information.” Chiang reflected in his diary: “The difficulty of annihilating the [Communist] bandits is greater than a big war, because they fight in their territory and can get the population to do what they want.”

Yet it was not Mao’s brutal strategy that clinched the Reds’ victory. What really tipped the scale was Russian assistance — though this remains virtually unknown. Moscow set up a top-level Military Advisory Group in the Soviet Union to plan strategy, and a military committee in Shanghai, staffed by Russian and other (especially German) advisers. The critical help came from Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, which had a network of more than 100 agents in China, mostly Chinese operating in Nationalist offices near the Red Army, whose main job was to provide information to the Chinese Communists. In early 1930, Moscow had dispatched a star officer, the half-German, half-Russian Richard Sorge, to Shanghai. Sorge’s main coup was to infiltrate the German military advisers’ group at Chiang’s forward intelligence HQ, where he worked on the disgruntled wife of one of the advisers, Stölzner, to steal the Nationalist codes, including those used for communications between the General Staff and units in the field. This information from Russian spies gave Mao an incalculable advantage. The CCP also had its own agents working in the heart of Nationalist intelligence. One, Qian Zhuang-fei, became the confidential secretary of the Nationalist intelligence chief U. T. Hsu, and played a big role in Mao’s success.

These intelligence networks provided Mao with precise information about the movements of Chiang’s army. Two weeks into the expedition, on 30 December 1930, Mao used 40,000 troops and civilians to lay an ambush against 9,000 Nationalist troops. The previous day he had learned exactly which units were coming, and when. Mao waited from dawn on a distant peak, while fog and mist shrouded the mountains, and then watched the action amidst maple leaves, some still blazing red on the trees and others fallen on the frosty ground. In the afternoon sunshine, excited cries from below announced victory. Most of the Nationalist troops had simply put up their hands, and the Nationalist commander was captured. The general was exhibited at a mass rally, which Mao addressed, and at which, under guidance, the crowd yelled: “Chop his head off! Eat his flesh!” His head was then sliced off, and sent down the river attached to a door, with a little white flag saying it was “a gift” for his superiors.

This ambush ended Chiang’s first expedition, from which the Red Army gained both arms and prisoners, as well as radios and radio operators. Mao’s prestige rose. Few had any idea about the critical role played by Russian intelligence, as well as by Russian money, medicine and arms. Mao had even asked for poison gas.

In April 1931, Nationalist troops came back for a second “annihilation expedition.” Again they were thwarted by the tactic of “luring the enemy deep into the Red area,” and again Moscow provided critical aid and intelligence, this time including a high-powered two-way radio acquired from Hong Kong, and Russian-trained radio technicians. For this campaign, Mao was able to intercept enemy communications.

But at the beginning of July Chiang Kai-shek himself led a vastly expanded force of 300,000 men for a third expedition, and modified his tactics so that it was much harder for Mao to use his intelligence advantage to lay ambushes. Moreover, this time the Generalissimo’s forces were ten times the size of Mao’s, and were able to stay and occupy the areas they were “lured” into. The Red Army found itself unable to return. Within two months the Red base had been reduced to a mere several dozen square kilometers, and Mao’s men were on the verge of collapse.

But Chiang did not press on. Mao was saved by the most unlikely actor — fascist Japan.

IN 1931, Japan stepped up its encroachment on Manchuria in northeast China. Faced with threats at opposite ends of his vast country, Chiang decided on a policy of “Domestic Stability First”—sort out the Reds before tackling Japan. But Tokyo torpedoed his timing. On 18 September Chiang boarded a ship from Nanjing to Jiangxi to give a big push to his drive against Mao’s shrunken base. That very night, at 10:00 PM, Japan invaded Manchuria, in effect starting the Pacific — and Second World — War. The Nationalist commander in Manchuria, Chang Hsueh-liang, known as the Young Marshal, did not fight back. Over sixty years later, he told us why: resistance would have been futile. “There was no way we could win,” he said. “We could only fight a guerrilla war, or have a shambolic go at it … The quality of the Chinese army could not compare with the Japanese … The Japanese army was really brilliant … ‘Non-resistance’ … was the only feasible policy.”

By the time Chiang Kai-shek arrived in Jiangxi next day, 19 September, Japan had already occupied the capital of Manchuria, Shenyang (aka Mukden), and other major cities, and he had to rush back to Nanjing on the 20th to cope with the crisis. He did not declare war on Japan, reasoning, like the Young Marshal, that armed resistance would be futile, given Japan’s overwhelming military power. Chiang’s tactic was to use China’s huge space, manpower and daunting terrain to buy time, knowing that it was virtually impossible for Japan to occupy and garrison the whole of China. For now, he sought intervention from the League of Nations. His long-term plan was to modernize his army, build up the economy, and fight Japan when there was some chance of winning.

“This misfortune might even turn out to be a blessing in disguise,” Chiang wrote in his diary, “if it gets the country united.” Nanjing immediately decided to “suspend the plan of … annihilating the Communists,” and proposed a United Front against Japan. The CCP spurned the idea, saying that any suggestion that it was willing to join a United Front was “ridiculous in the extreme.” The Communists’ attitude was that the Nationalists, not the Japanese, were their chief enemy, and their slogans made this pointedly clear, ordaining “Down with the Nationalists,” but merely “Oppose Japanese imperialists.” The Party’s “central task” was described as “defending the Soviet Union with arms” (following Moscow’s line that the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was a prelude to attacking the Soviet Union).

Since then, history has been completely rewritten, and the world has come to believe that the CCP was more patriotic and keener to fight Japan than the Nationalists were — and that the CCP, not the Nationalists, was the party that proposed the United Front. All this is untrue.

When he came up with the idea of a United Front against Japan, Chiang pulled his troops out of the war zone in Jiangxi. The Reds at once exploited this opportunity to recover lost territory, expand, and establish their own state.

On 7 November 1931, the fourteenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, this state was proclaimed. Although it was not recognized by any other country, not even its sponsor, the Soviet Union, it was the only Communist regime in the world outside the Communist bloc, which then consisted only of Russia and Mongolia.

This state was made up of several Red regions dotted around the heartland of the country, in the provinces of Jiangxi, Fujian, Hunan, Hubei, Henan, Anhui and Zhejiang. At its maximum, the total territory covered some 150,000–160,000 square km, with a population of over 10 million. At the time of its founding the largest enclave was the “Central Base Area,” the region where Mao was operating, which consisted of Red Jiangxi and Red Fujian, covering some 50,000 sq. km, with a population of 3.5 million. Moscow had designated it as the seat of the Red government over a year before, with the town of Ruijin as its capital.

Moscow also appointed Mao head of the state, with the very un-Chinese title of chairman of the Central Executive Committee. He was “prime minister” as well, being chairman of the body called the People’s Committee. On the evening the posts were announced, a crony came to see Mao. This man had personally tortured Lee Wen-lin, the Jiangxi Red leader Mao most hated, and afterwards had reported the details to Mao. He now came to offer congratulations. “Mao Zhu-xi—Chairman Mao!” he called out. “You learn really fast,” Mao replied. “You are the first person.” This torturer was the first person to use the title that was to become part of the world’s vocabulary: “Chairman Mao.”

In the outlaw land, the first Communist county chief of Ninggang was killed, in September 1928, by his fellow-Communists, seven months after he had been installed at a rally where his Nationalist predecessor was speared to death. The man Mao left in charge of the area was also killed in a bloody vendetta nine months after Mao’s departure. He had apparently had the beautiful young wife of a Party official tortured and executed on the charge of being an enemy agent. He was then killed on the same charge.

Even when the purge had counterproductive effects. A 1932 report by the (Communist) Federation of Labor said workers were “simply scared” to join Communist unions: “They have seen that the majority [sic] of the workers [who were] members of the trade union were executed [i.e., by their own comrades] on the charge of belonging to ‘AB.’ ”

Subsequently famous as the spy who in 1941 provided Stalin with the vital intelligence that Japan was not going to attack the Soviet Far East when Hitler invaded European Russia. One of Sorge’s assistants was a woman called Zhang Wen-qiu, whose two daughters later married Mao’s two surviving sons. She had come to Sorge’s attention through Agnes Smedley, an American agent for the Comintern.

Thanks to the control of the Red territories, Party membership rose to 120,000 in 1931, from 18,000 at the end of 1926.

9. MAO AND THE FIRST RED STATE (1931–34 AGE 37–40)

RUIJIN, THE CAPITAL of the new Red state, was situated in southeast Jiangxi, in the middle of a red-earth basin cradled by hills on three sides. It was 300 roadless km from the Nationalist-controlled provincial capital, Nanchang, but only about 40 km from the large Red-held city of Tingzhou over the border in Fujian, which was linked to the outside world by river. Semi-tropical, the area was blessed with rich agricultural products, and endowed with unusual giant trees like camphor and the banyan, whose old tough roots rose overground, while new roots cascaded from the crown.

The headquarters of the Red government lay outside the town, at the site of a large clan temple 500 years old, with a hall spacious enough to hold hundreds of people for the inevitable meetings. Where the clan altar had stood, a stage was built in the Soviet Russian fashion. On it hung red woodcut portraits of Marx and Lenin, and between them a red flag with a gold star and a hammer and sickle. A red cloth above it was stitched in gold thread with the slogan: “Proletariat of all the world, unite!” Next to it, in silver, was the slogan: “Class Struggle.” Down both sides of the hall, makeshift partitions demarcated fifteen offices as the new state administration. They had names that were direct translations from Russian, and were a mouthful in Chinese, like “People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.”

Behind the clan temple, a large square was cleared of trees and farmland to make room for the Communists’ staple activity: mass rallies. Later on, various monuments were built on this square. At one end was a timber-and-brick dais for holding Soviet-style military reviews. At the other was a tower to commemorate Red Army dead (called “martyrs”), shaped like a giant bullet, with numerous bullet-like stones sticking out of it. Flanking this were two memorials, one a pavilion, the other a fortress, named after two dead Red commanders. The whole set-up anticipated Tiananmen Square in Communist Peking, though the monuments were much more imaginative and colorful than the leaden architecture later to disfigure Tiananmen.

Nearby, deep in a wood, the Communists built a camouflaged auditorium with a capacity of 2,000, whose excellent acoustics were designed to make up for the absence of microphones. It was octagonal, shaped like the Red Army cap of the day. The façade was reminiscent of a European cathedral, only with shuttered windows, through which people could look out, but not in. Above the central gate was an enormous red star with a globe bulging out in the middle, firmly locked in by a hammer and sickle. Next to the auditorium was an air-raid shelter capable of holding over 1,000 people, with two access doors located just behind the stage, so that the leaders could reach it first.

The leaders lived in a mansion which had belonged to the richest person in the village, situated to one side of the clan temple now turned government office. Here Mao chose the best accommodation, a corner suite at the back with a window looking out onto the temple. This window was specially made for him, as the previous owner, out of deference for the temple, would not have any windows overlooking it. Mao also had a brick floor laid over the timber to keep out rats.

The land abutting the leaders’ residence was taken over to house guards and orderlies, as well as high-security installations like the gold store, the switchboard and the radio station. Apart from some villagers kept on to work as servants, the rest were evicted en masse, and the whole area was barricaded off from the outside. None of the Party bosses was able to speak the local dialect, and most made no effort to learn, so they needed interpreters to communicate with the locals, with whom they had little contact anyway. Cadres from the region acted as their links. It was the style and pattern of an occupying army.

ON 7 NOVEMBER 1931, Ruijin held a grand celebration to mark the founding of the Red state. That evening, tens of thousands of locals were organized to put on a parade, holding bamboo torches and lanterns in the shape of stars or hammers and sickles. The streams of lights simmered against the darkness of the night, producing quite a spectacle. There were drums and firecrackers and skits, one with a “British imperialist” driving before him prisoners in chains labeled “India” and “Ireland.” A generator, roaring in an air-raid shelter by the side of the temple, produced electricity, which shone in the numerous small bulbs arrayed along wires slung from pillar to pillar. They illuminated the endless banners and slogans of different colors that also hung from the wires — as well as giant red, white and black posters on the walls. Mao and the other leaders stood on the presidium, clapping and shouting slogans, as the procession passed below them. This was Mao’s first taste of future glories when up to a million people would hail him on Tiananmen.

But here there was one vital difference: Mao in Ruijin was not the supreme leader. Although Moscow made him the “president” and the “prime minister,” it did not make him the dictator. Instead it surrounded him with other men whom it could trust to obey its orders. At the top of the army was Zhu De, who was appointed chief of the Military Council. Zhu had been trained in Russia, and the Russians knew him — and knew that he was loyal. Moscow had earlier considered Mao for the post, but had changed its mind. He ended up as only one of the Council’s fifteen ordinary members.

Most importantly, Mao had a direct, on-the-spot Chinese boss: Chou En-lai, who was to arrive from Shanghai in December 1931, the month after the regime was established, and take up the post of Party chief. In the Communist system, Party boss was the highest authority, above the head of state. With Chou’s arrival, the center of the Party itself shifted to Ruijin, and Shanghai became little more than a liaison office with the Russians. Reliable radio communication was established between Ruijin and Moscow, via Shanghai, where a young man called Po Ku was in charge. The person controlling communication with Moscow was not Mao but Chou En-lai. It was Chou who built Ruijin into a Stalinist state. Mao was not the main person responsible for the foundation and operation of Red Ruijin.

Chou was a master of organization, and under him the whole society was dragooned into an all-encompassing, interlocking machine. He was instrumental in building a huge bureaucracy, whose job was not only to run the base, but also to coerce the population into executing Party orders. In any one village, the state set up dozens of committees—“recruitment committee,” “land committee,” “confiscation committee,” “registration committee,” “red curfew committee,” to name but a few. People first got enmeshed in an organization from the age of six, when they had to join the Children’s Corps. At the age of fifteen, they were automatically enrolled in the Youth Brigade. All adults except the very old and crippled were put into the Red Defense Army. In this way, the entire population was regimented, and a web of control was formed.

This machine was an eye-opener to Mao. Before Chou arrived, Mao had ruled the Red land in bandit style, with less regimentation of the population as a whole; but it did not take long for him to appreciate the advantages and potential of the new way. When he eventually took power nationwide, he inherited this totalitarian machine and made it even more seamless and intrusive than Ruijin — or Stalin’s Russia. And he retained Chou’s services till Chou’s last breath.

Chou had also founded the Chinese KGB, then called the Political Security Bureau, under Moscow’s supervision, in 1928. He and his assistants brought the system into Ruijin, and kept the state alive via terror. Whereas Mao had been using terror for personal power, Chou employed it to bolster Communist rule. The henchmen Mao used for his purges had been cynical and corrupt, and out for personal gain. Chou employed Soviet-trained professionals.

When Chou first arrived in Ruijin at the end of 1931, he had adjudged Mao’s purge methods as not altogether correct. Mao had “relied entirely on confessions and torture,” and “caused terror in the masses.” Chou rehabilitated some victims. One man recalled the process. An official

took out a notebook and began to read out names. Those whose names were read out were ordered to go and stand in the inner courtyard under armed guards. There were scores of names … Mine was called, too. I was so frightened I sweated all over. Then we were questioned one by one, and cleared one by one. In no time, all the detainees were released. And all the incriminating confessions were burned on the spot …

But within a matter of months Chou had brought this respite to an end. Even so short a period of rehabilitation and easing up had released a groundswell of dissidence. “Relaxing about purges caused counter-revolutionaries … to raise their heads again,” Chou’s security men noted aghast. And as people thought, wishfully, that there would be “no more killings,” “no more arrests,” they started to band together to defy Communist orders. It rapidly became clear that the regime could not survive without constant killings, and killing soon restarted.

THE RED STATE regarded its population as a source of four main assets: money, food, labor and soldiers, first for its war, and ultimately to conquer China.

There was a big money-spinner in the region — the largest deposit in the world of tungsten, an extremely valuable strategic mineral that had previously been mined by a consortium of foreign capital. The Red regime resumed mining at the beginning of 1932. With soldiers and slave laborers as miners, the tungsten was exported across the Reds’ southern border to the Cantonese warlords who, though White, were anti-Chiang, and eager to make money. The Red area was in theory under blockade, yet trade with the Cantonese boomed, even when they and the Red Army were sometimes fighting each other. Salt, cotton, medicine and even arms, were openly trucked in, in exchange for tungsten. The operation was run by Mao’s brother Tse-min, who was head of the state bank.

In spite of the vast profits it was making from tungsten and other exports, the regime never relaxed its schemes to extract the maximum from the local population. Although peasants now got their own land, and ground rent was abolished, they were in general worse off than before. Prior to this, most people had some possessions beyond those needed for sheer survival; now these extras were taken away, under various ruses. One was to coerce people to buy “revolutionary war bonds.” To pay for these, women were made to cut their hair so that they would hand over their silver hairpins, together with their last bit of jewelry — traditionally their life savings. The fact that people had such jewelry in pre-Communist days was a telling indication that their standard of living had been higher then. After people bought the war bonds, there would be “return bonds campaigns,” to browbeat purchasers to give back the bonds for nothing. The upshot was, as some daring inhabitants bemoaned, that “the Communists’ bonds are worse than the Nationalists’ taxes.”

The method was the same with food. After paying grain tax, peasants were pressured to lend more grain to the state, in drives with slogans like “Revolutionary masses, lend grain to the Red Army!” But the food “lent” was never returned. It was in fact food on which peasants depended for survival. Mao simply ordered them to cut down on their already meager consumption.

Most men of working age were drafted into the army or as conscript labor. After three years of Communist rule, there were hardly any men left in the villages aged between their early teens and fifty.

Women became the main labor force. Traditionally, women had done only fairly light work in the fields, as their bound and crippled feet meant that heavy manual labor caused great pain. Now they had to do most of the farm work, as well as other chores for the Red Army, like carrying loads, looking after the wounded, washing and mending clothes, and making shoes, for which they had to pay for the material themselves — no small extra burden. Mao, who had thought since his youth that women were capable of doing as much heavy labor as men, was the strongest advocate of this policy. He decreed: “Rely overwhelmingly on women to do farm work.”

The welfare of the locals was simply not on the agenda (contrary to the myth Mao fed to his American spokesman Edgar Snow). In some villages, peasants were not allowed any days off at all. Instead they got meetings, the Communists’ great control mechanism. “The average person has the equivalent of five whole days of meetings per month,” Mao observed, “and these are very good rest time for them.”

Standards of health did not improve either. There was a former British missionary hospital in Tingzhou which treated ordinary people. After Mao stayed there and liked it, he had it dismantled and relocated in Ruijin, and reserved it for the Communist elite. Mao himself was very careful about his health, always traveling with his own mug, which he used whenever he was offered a cup of tea. At one point he stayed in a village called Sand Islet, where the only drinking water came from a stagnant pond. To make sure he did not catch anything, he ordered a well to be dug. As a result, the villagers had clean drinking water for the first time. After this, Communist offices began to have wells dug where they were billeted, but there was no effort to provide the locals with clean water.

Education, Mao claimed via Snow, had brought about higher literacy rates in some counties “than had been achieved anywhere else in rural China after centuries.” In fact, education under the Reds was reduced to primary schools, called “Lenin schools,” where children were taught to read and write to a level at which they could take in basic propaganda. Secondary schools were mostly closed down, and commandeered as quarters for the leaders and venues for meetings. Children were used as sentries, and formed into harassment squads, called “humiliation teams,” to hound people into joining the army and to pressure deserters to return. Teenagers were sometimes encouraged to serve as executioners of “class enemies.”

ONE OF MAO’S main contributions to the running of the Red state was to start a campaign in February 1933 to squeeze out more from the population. He told grassroots cadres to uncover “hidden landlords and kulaks.” As the Reds had been targeting these “class enemies” for years, it was inconceivable that any such species could have remained undetected.

Mao was not a fanatic, searching for more enemies out of ideological fervor. His was a practical operation whose goal was to designate targets to be shaken down, and to create enemies who could be “legitimately,” according to Communist doctrine, dispossessed and worked to death — what Mao himself termed “to do limitless forced labour.” The other point was to scare the rest of the population into coughing up whatever the regime demanded.

Mao’s order to cadres was to “confiscate every last single thing” from those picked out as victims. Often whole families were turned out of their homes, and had to go and live in buffalo sheds, niu-peng. It was during this era that the miserable dwellings into which outcasts were suddenly pitched came to receive this name. Over thirty years later, in the Cultural Revolution, the term was widely used for detention, even though at that time people were not usually detained in rural outhouses, but in places like toilets, classrooms and cinemas.

Mao’s campaign produced many tens of thousands of slave laborers, but it turned up little for the state coffers, as peasants genuinely had nothing left to disgorge. The authorities reported that only two out of twelve counties in Jiangxi were able to produce any “fines” and “donations” at all, and the total amount was a fraction of the target set by Mao.

The plight of the victims was vividly portrayed by a Red Army officer called Gong Chu, who described passing by a place called Gong Mill near Ruijin, inhabited by people with the same family name as his, which meant they might share ancestors with him.

I went into a big black-tiled bungalow … I was struck by a tremendous air of sadness and desolation. There was no furniture at all, only one broken table and a bench. There were two middle-aged women and an old woman, plus three young children, all in rags, and looking famished. When they saw me come in with four bodyguards wearing pistols, they went into a tremendous panic …

Then they heard Gong Chu’s name, and they “went down on their knees in front of me, and begged me to save their lives.”

Between sobs the old woman said: “My old man had read some books [which meant the family had been relatively well off], and so had my two sons. We had over ten mu of land and my two sons tilled it … my old man and two sons were all arrested … and were beaten and hung up, and 250 yuan was demanded from us. We did all we could to make up 120 yuan, and also gave them all the women’s jewelery … But … my old man was still left there hanging till he died, and my two sons were killed as well. Now they are forcing us to pay another 500 yuan, otherwise all six of us will be imprisoned. Commander! We hardly have anything to eat, where can we find the 500 yuan? Please, think of our common ancestry and put in a fair word for us.”

The woman told Gong Chu her husband had wanted to go and look for him. But the authorities

“forbade us from setting one step outside the village. Today Heaven really opened its eyes, that you should have come into our family. Please Commander, save us!” After these words, she banged her head on the ground non-stop. Her two daughters-in-law and the children were all kowtowing and crying.

Gong Chu promised to help, but ultimately did nothing — as he knew that intervening could easily make things worse. Some months before, when he had tried to help a doctor in a similar situation, vengeful grassroots cadres had waited till he left and then “killed the doctor and confiscated his medicine shop. His widow and children became beggars.” It was events like these that drove Gong Chu to reject communism and flee at the first opportunity.

Mao was also resourceful in making people “volunteer” to join the Red Army. When one cadre had difficulty getting people to enlist, Mao told her to “find counter-revolutionaries within three days.” She did, and those scared of falling foul of the regime joined up. In one district, the man in charge of conscription failed to produce enough conscripts. Mao had this man, Cai Dun-song, brought to him, and had him worked over, most likely tortured, as Cai “confessed” to having formed an “anti-Communist brigade.” A mass rally was held at which Mao announced the confession, and Cai and a number of others were executed on the spot. A cadre who had worked with Cai said that afterwards “in less than half a month, I enrolled more than 150 people.”

CHINA’S FIRST RED STATE was run by terror and guarded like a prison. A pass was needed to leave one’s village, and sentries were ubiquitous round the clock. One person who did have a chance of getting away was the manager of state monument-building who had access to cash. He took 246.7 yuan — enough to buy a pass and pay contacts. But before he could make his getaway, he was arrested. He then managed to break out of jail, with the collusion of two senior cadres, one of them a man who had seen his brother killed as AB. The manager was caught and brought before a kangaroo court attended by hundreds of people, then executed. Old-timers recalled that not only was anyone “trying to flee to the White area” killed, but sometimes “if a prisoner escaped, the jailer was executed.”

In this prison-like universe, suicide was common — an early wave of what was later to grow to a flood throughout Mao’s reign. The number of suicides was so staggering, even among officials, that the regime had to tackle it publicly, as proclaimed by a slogan: “Suicides are the most shameful elements in the revolutionary ranks.”

Even a very high-ranking officer, Yang Yue-bin, a favorite of Mao’s, was desperate enough to flee and defect to the Nationalists. He gave away the location of Party leaders’ houses. The Nationalists bombed the site, and the leaders had to decamp wholesale.

Ordinary people had more chance to escape if they lived on the edge of the Red region, and some grassroots cadres who hated the regime organized mass escapes. Any cadre under the slightest suspicion of being unreliable would be transferred away from the outlying districts at once. Many waited until the Nationalists attacked and then tried to go over. In the last days of the Red state, when the Nationalists were closing in, whole villages rebelled, and started to attack the Red Army as it retreated, wielding the only weapons they had, knives and spears, as all firearms had been rounded up by the regime.

The state’s response was to be merciless and not to take the slightest chance. At its nadir, even everyday social intercourse and hospitality could bring death. “No family was allowed to have visitors to stay overnight,” veterans recalled. “Any family found to have done so was killed together with the visitor.”

The Ruijin base, the seat of the first Red state, consisted of large parts of the provinces of Jiangxi and Fujian. These two provinces suffered the greatest population decrease in the whole of China from the year when the Communist state was founded, 1931, to the year after the Reds left, 1935. The population of Red Jiangxi fell by more than half a million — a drop of 20 percent. The fall in Red Fujian was comparable. Given that escapes were few, this means that altogether some 700,000 people died in the Ruijin base. A large part of these were murdered as “class enemies,” or were worked to death, or committed suicide, or died other premature deaths attributable to the regime. The figure of 700,000 does not include the many deaths in the large areas the Reds occupied for intermittent periods, or the huge number of deaths in the five Red bases in other parts of China that came under Ruijin.

Years later, locals would point out to travelers mass graves and derelict villages. People who lived under China’s first Communist regime rejected it. When the first Russian intelligence officer visited the area immediately after the Communists took it in late 1949 the newly arrived Party chief told him that in all Jiangxi “there was not one member of the CCP.”

The nominal Party No. 1, Hsiang Chung-fa, had been executed by the Nationalists that June, after a tip-off which the Nationalist intelligence chief U. T. Hsu strongly suggested had come from the Communists themselves. At first Hsiang refused to admit he was the CCP No. 1. “And, seeing this rather stupid-looking man,” Hsu wrote, “we felt we could well be mistaken. But a colleague said that … when Hsiang was a sailor, he had been addicted to gambling, and once when he had lost every penny, he vowed to kick the addiction, and chopped off the tip of the little finger of his left hand … The man’s left little finger did indeed have a chunk missing …” After Hsiang was identified, he went down on his knees to beg for his life, “and at once gave us four top addresses.” Chou En-lai later remarked that Hsiang’s fidelity to communism could not be compared even to the chastity of a prostitute.

Gong’s devastating memoir was published in Hong Kong in 1954. The post-Mao president of China, Yang Shang-kun, himself a witness to the Ruijin time, acknowledged to a small circle that the memoir was true, though it was banned in China. However, Gong was allowed to go back and live in the Mainland in 1991, age ninety.

In 1983, after Mao was dead, 238,844 people in Jiangxi were counted as “revolutionary martyrs,” i.e., people who had been killed in wars and intra-Party purges.

10. TROUBLEMAKER TO FIGUREHEAD (1931–34 AGE 37–40)

WHEN MAO WAS inaugurated as president of the Red state, he had in fact lost his former absolute control over the area, and especially over the Red Army. Moscow had appointed Zhu De the army chief. Moreover, as Party secretary, Chou En-lai was the No. 1. Mao refused to fit into a collective leadership and tried intimidation. His colleagues fought back and accused him of a multitude of sins, even of adopting a “kulak line,” an accusation Mao himself had used to send many Jiangxi Reds to their deaths. Now he was up against a steel wall. At a meeting after Chou arrived, Mao took the chair and started behaving as though he were still in charge. The others intervened to unseat him, and put Chou in the chair. Very soon Mao asked for “sick leave,” which was happily granted, and he left Ruijin in a sulk at the end of January 1932.

He went off to a commandeered Buddhist temple called Donghua Hill, one of many giant rocks rising out of the plain round Ruijin. Covered with metasequoias, cypresses and pines, and dotted with smooth black stones, the hill sheltered the ancient temple in its luxuriant midst. Here Mao spent the days with his wife, Gui-yuan, and a detachment of guards. It was large and rang with echoes. Moss grew on the damp earthen floor. Outside Mao’s monastery room, leaves fell in the winter wind and rain sank into the cracks of the stone courtyard, bringing out more chill. It was a mournful scene.

Mao had brought with him two iron-clad cases filled with documents, newspaper cuttings, notes, and poems he had composed over the years. When it was sunny, the bodyguards would set out these cases in the courtyard, one on top of the other, and Mao would sit on a makeshift stool reading and rereading the contents, pondering how to reclaim his lost power.

He still received top-level documents daily, along with his beloved newspapers, both Nationalist and Communist. It was from these newspapers that he spotted a golden opportunity — which he may in fact have created himself. Between 16 and 21 February, a “recantation notice” appeared in major Nationalist newspapers, bearing Chou En-lai’s then pseudonym, renouncing communism and condemning the Communist Party, especially for its subservience to Moscow. The CCP office in Shanghai went to considerable lengths to counter the impact, and put it about that the notice was a fake, circulating leaflets to this effect and trying to place statements in the newspapers.

Although there is no doubt that the notice was a plant, Chou’s name and authority were undermined. Mao was thus able to exploit this vulnerability. His strategy was not to try to unseat Chou, which would have been unrealistic, but to get Chou to back him to sideline Zhu De and regain control of the army.

In early March, Mao was invited to a crisis meeting 125 km west of Ruijin, outside the city of Ganzhou, which the Red Army had been trying in vain to capture. The minute the invitation arrived Mao hurried off, even though it was raining hard. Gui-yuan tried to get him to wait until it stopped, but he insisted on leaving at once, and was drenched in an instant. He raced on horseback through the night, and when he got to the meeting weighed straight in to criticize the military command. Most other leaders were in no mood to listen to a lecture from him, and no one suggested he should be reinstated as head of the army.

But now that Mao was back with the army, he hung on there, and started to put his scheme into action. The Reds soon had to call off the siege of Ganzhou, and the majority agreed they should fight their way westwards to link up with another Red pocket on the Jiangxi — Hunan border. Mao, however, insisted they should go in the opposite direction. As he dug his heels in, it fell to Chou En-lai, as Party chief, to make a decision. Chou opted to endorse both plans, but to send only one-third of the army in the direction favored by the majority, while dispatching the greater part of the army with Mao in the direction Mao wanted. Chou thus allowed Mao to snatch back control of two-thirds of the army, against the wishes of most of the leadership.

The most likely explanation for this extraordinary decision is that Chou felt it was better, probably vital, to placate Mao. He knew that Mao had threatened to frame both Peng De-huai and Zhu De (plus another Party leader who had opposed Mao, Xiang Ying) with accusations of being “AB.” Mao had not batted an eyelid about slaughtering tens of thousands of loyal Reds who had stood in his way. Mao, in fact, was quite capable of having planted the recantation notice himself. He had displayed a penchant for manipulating the press; for example, creating the rumor of his own death. And why did the fake recantation come right at the time when Chou had just supplanted Mao as the No. 1 in the Red state? Chou could not afford to make an enemy out of Mao.

Chou’s fear of Mao dated from now and was never to leave him. Mao was repeatedly to dangle the planted recantation over Chou, right up to Chou’s death more than four decades later.

Mao had told Chou and the military leadership that he wanted to go northeast. After he set off, he suddenly changed route and led his two-thirds of the army to the southeast coast, only informing Chou when he was well on the way, making it impossible for Chou to say no. Later Mao’s colleagues condemned the excursion as an interruption that had “delayed our plans.”

In making this detour, Mao had the collaboration of his old accomplice Lin Biao, the man who had ganged up with him before to sabotage Zhu De. Lin was the core commander of the force assigned to Mao. On 20 April this force took the prosperous city of Zhangzhou, very near the coast, which was feebly defended and which Mao had targeted for personal reasons.

One was to gain prestige in the wider world, as Zhangzhou was well connected internationally. Very much with newspaper coverage in mind, Mao entered the city on a white horse, looking uncharacteristically smart in a Sun Yat-sen suit and topee. The army marched in four columns, with bugles blowing. Mao sent his colleagues press cuttings that he collected about himself, reporting his exploits in terms like: “Red Army in Zhangzhou; whole coast shaken; over 100,000 flee”; “28 foreign gunboats gathering in Amoy.” Mao was well aware that the higher his profile, the more obliging Moscow would be. Indeed, when his exasperated colleagues moved to oust him later that year, Moscow restrained them, citing this very reason. As their representative in Shanghai, the German Arthur Ewert, reassured the Russians, he had immediately stressed to Ruijin that “Mao Tse-tung is already a high-profile leader … And so … we have protested against Mao’s removal …”

But the key reason for Mao to go to Zhangzhou was to amass a private fortune. A large number of crates marked with huge characters, “To be delivered to Mao Tse-tung personally,” went back to Jiangxi. They filled a whole truck, and when the road ran out they were carried by porters. They were said to contain books Mao had bought or looted, and some did. But many contained gold, silver and jewels. They were secretly carried to the top of a mountain by porters, and stored inside a cave by two trusted bodyguards, supervised by Mao’s brother Tse-min. The entrance was sealed, and only these few knew about the haul. The Party leadership was kept in the dark. Mao had bought himself insurance in case he fell out with the Party — and with Moscow.

WHILE MAO HAD been lingering in Zhangzhou, in May 1932 Chiang Kai-shek was gearing up for another “annihilation expedition,” his fourth, deploying half a million troops. The setting up of the Red state had convinced him that the Communists were not going to unite with him against Japan. On 28 January that year, Japan had attacked Shanghai, China’s key commercial and industrial city, 1,000 km from Manchuria. This time, Chinese troops fought back, taking tremendous casualties. As Japan’s military objectives in the Shanghai area at this stage were limited, the League of Nations was able to broker a ceasefire. Throughout the crisis, which lasted till late April, the Reds worked single-mindedly to expand their own territory. After the crisis subsided, Chiang resuscitated his policy of “Domestic Stability First,” and geared up to attack the Red bases again.

When they received this intelligence, the CCP leadership cabled Mao to bring the army back to the Red base without delay. Mao replied that he did not believe Chiang would “launch an offensive like the third expedition last year,” and told the Party its “assessment and military strategy are utterly wrong.” He refused to leave Zhangzhou until nearly a month had elapsed and Chiang’s intention was made public — and Mao proven wrong.

On 29 May he had to return to Red Jiangxi. Thanks to Mao having led them into an isolated cul-de-sac, the tens of thousands of troops with him had to march back over 300 km, in searing heat, and a large number fell ill and died. En route, they had to fight an extra enemy — the Cantonese, who had previously avoided fighting the Reds. The Cantonese had adopted an independent position vis-à-vis Chiang — indeed, had been hatching a plot against him. But Mao’s foray into Zhangzhou had alarmed them: it was only about 80 km from their own province, and the proximity of the danger goaded them into action. Near a town called Water Mouth, the Red Army had to fight one of its few really tough battles, suffering unusually high casualties. The Red soldiers who fought most impressively were some recent mutineers from the Nationalist army, who went into battle stripped to the waist and brandishing giant knives.^†

In spite of causing all these unnecessary casualties and hardships for the Red Army, not only was Mao not reprimanded, he went on the offensive by demanding that he be given the highest post in the army, that of chief political commissar. Mao can only have been encouraged by Moscow’s unbelievably indulgent attitude towards him. While Mao was dallying in Zhangzhou, the Party leadership, Chou included, had collectively cabled Moscow, calling Mao’s actions “hundred percentage right opportunism” and “absolutely contrary to instructions of the C.I. [Comintern].” But Moscow’s response was that they must at all costs keep Mao on board, and maintain his profile and status. It was clear that Moscow regarded Mao as indispensable, and the Kremlin consistently showed a regard for him that it did not bestow on any other leader. If it came to a showdown, Moscow would most likely take Mao’s side.

On 25 July, Chou recommended meeting Mao’s demands, “in order to facilitate battle command at the front.” His colleagues wanted to give the job to Chou, but Chou pleaded: “If you insist that Chou is to be the chief political commissar, this would … leave the government Chairman [Mao] with nothing to do … It is awkward in the extreme …” On 8 August, Mao was appointed chief political commissar of the army.

MAO HAD REGAINED control of the army, but differences with his colleagues only deepened. In summer 1932, Chiang was focusing his attacks on two Red territories north of Jiangxi; on Moscow’s instructions the Party ordered all its armies to coordinate their movements to help these areas. Mao’s assignment was to lead his army closer to the two bases under assault and draw off enemy forces by attacking towns. He did this for a while, then when the going got tough simply refused to fight anymore. In spite of urgent cables asking for help, he basically sat by for a month while Chiang drove the Reds out of these other two bases.

Chiang’s next target was Jiangxi. Moscow had decided that the best strategy here was to meet Chiang’s attack head-on, but once again Mao just withheld his consent, insisting that it would be much better to disperse the Communist forces and wait and see. Mao did not believe that the hugely outnumbered Red Army could defeat Chiang, and seems to have set his hopes on Moscow bailing out the Chinese Reds. At the time, Moscow and Nanjing were negotiating to restore diplomatic relations, which Moscow had severed in 1929 over China’s attempt to take control of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria. Mao’s calculation seems to have been that Chiang would have to allow the Chinese Reds to survive as a gesture to Moscow.

Mao’s colleagues regarded his passive delaying tactics as “extremely dangerous.” Mao would not budge. “Sometimes arguments became endless, endless,” as Chou put it; “it is impossible to know what to do.”

An emergency meeting had to be convened at the beginning of October, which turned into a showdown with Mao. All the eight top men in the Red base gathered in the town of Ningdu for a meeting chaired by Chou. The anger that flared against Mao can be felt through the jargon the participants used to describe the scene, where, as they put it, they “engaged in unprecedented two-line struggle [“two-line” means as if against an enemy], and broke the previous pattern of yielding to and placating” Mao, which was a reference to Chou’s kid-glove treatment of Mao.

Mao was denounced for “disrespect for Party leadership, and lacking the concept of the Organization”—in other words, insubordination. The tone would have been harsher still if it had not been for Chou, who, as some of his colleagues reported, “did not criticise Tse-tung’s mistakes unambiguously, but rather, in some places, tried to gloss over and explain away” his actions. The top cadres still in Shanghai, especially Po Ku, were so infuriated with Mao that they wired their colleagues in Ningdu without consulting Moscow’s representatives (which was most unusual, and a sign of how angry they were), calling his actions “intolerable” and saying he must be removed from the army. There was even a suggestion that he should be expelled from the Party.

Giving Moscow no time to intervene, the leaders in Ningdu dismissed Mao on the spot from his army post, although in deference to Moscow’s orders not to impair Mao’s public image, the troops were told that he was “temporarily returning to the central government to chair everything.” Moscow was told that Mao had gone to the rear “owing to sickness.”

During the conference, Mao cabled Shanghai twice from Ningdu, which was clearly an attempt to enlist Moscow’s help. But Ewert, Moscow’s man in Shanghai, who had also lost patience with Mao, chose to report to Moscow by courier, not cable, so the news of Mao’s dismissal did not reach Moscow until the conference was over. Ewert found himself having to explain his failure to save Mao to Moscow. The “decision … to remove and criticise” Mao had been taken “without prior agreement with us” and Ewert said he disagreed with it: “a decision like this [should not] be taken without exhausting all other possibilities …” Although “there is no doubt whatever that … Mao Tse-tung is wrong … friendly persuasion must be used with Mao.”

Moscow ordered the CCP: “Regarding your differences with comrade Mao Tse-tung, we repeat: Try to win him for the line of active struggle in a comradely way. We are against recalling Mao Tse-tung from the army at the present time if he submits to discipline.” On 2 November, Stalin was asked “urgently” for his opinion. Mao’s colleagues were then told to explain why they had pushed Mao out of the army. Moscow criticized Mao’s critics, and praised Chou’s gentle handling.

Russian backing came too late for Mao, who had left Ningdu on 12 October, his post as army commissar taken by Chou. Mao never forgave his opponents at Ningdu, and they were later made to pay, some of them dearly. The main butt of Mao’s resentment was Chou, even though he had tried to safeguard Mao, the reason being that he ended up with Mao’s job. In later life, Chou made more than 100 self-denunciations, and the fiercest self-flagellation was reserved for Ningdu. Forty years later, as prime minister, in spring 1972, right after being diagnosed with cancer of the bladder and in the middle of extremely demanding negotiations with the US, Japan and many other countries (at which he greatly impressed his foreign interlocutors), Chou was made to perform one groveling apology after another to groups of high officials. One topic that kept recurring was Ningdu.

CONFIDENT THAT HE mattered to Moscow, Mao adamantly refused to go and do his job in Ruijin, and went instead to “convalesce” in Tingzhou, where the former missionary Hospital of the Gospel provided the best medical care in the Red area (before Mao had it moved to Ruijin). He stayed in a sumptuous two-story villa which had formerly belonged to a rich Christian and had been commandeered for the Red elite. Cradled in a wooded hill and encircled on both levels by spacious loggias carved in dark wood, the villa afforded shade and breeze ideal for the southern heat, as well as scent and beauty from the orange trees and banana leaves in the subtropical garden.

From this elegant villa, Mao ran a competing HQ. He summoned various followers, and told them not to stand and fight when they came under attack from the Nationalists, but to evacuate front-line areas. The attitude he encouraged his coterie to adopt towards Party orders was: “carry them out if they suit you, and ignore them if they don’t.”

In January 1933, Po Ku, the 25-year-old who had been running the Party office in Shanghai (and who had just urged his colleagues at Ningdu to dump Mao), arrived in the Ruijin base. Po Ku was fourteen years Mao’s junior, and had only been in the Party seven years. He was extremely bright, and impressed Edgar Snow as having a mind “very quick and as subtle as, and perhaps more supple than Chou En-lai’s.” He spoke good Russian and English, and knew Moscow’s ways, having trained there for three and a half years (1926–30). Above all, he was exceptionally decisive, a quality much appreciated by his comrades, most of whom were exasperated by Chou, who was seen as far too accommodating towards Mao. Even though Po Ku was much younger and less experienced, the majority voted for him to take over the Party chair from Chou, who retained command of the military. Chou let this happen, as he had no thirst for personal power, nor did he yearn to be No. 1. In fact, he rather seems to have welcomed there being somebody above him.

Po was incensed by what Mao had been doing, and decided to act at once, as Ruijin faced an imminent onslaught from Chiang. In addition, Po was receiving a lot of other complaints about Mao. Peng De-huai described Mao as “a nasty character” who “had insulted” Zhu De. He “likes to stir up squabbles,” Peng said. “Mao’s methods are very brutal. If you do not submit to him, he will without fail find ways to make you submit. He does not know how to unite the cadres.”

Po’s hands, however, were tied. When he left Shanghai, Moscow’s agent Ewert had told him bluntly that he absolutely had to work with Mao. But this injunction did not extend to Mao’s followers, and here Po took action. From February 1933 on, a string of Mao’s acolytes — all low-level, including Mao’s brother Tse-tan — was criticized in the press, though only the top few knew that Mao was the real target, and his reputation among the rank and file was carefully preserved. Moreover, Po did not use Mao’s killer methods. Although the language was high-decibel (“smash into smithereens,” “cruelly struggle”), Mao’s followers were treated as comrades who had erred, not as “enemies,” and some were allowed to retain important posts.

Po Ku was able to dismantle Mao’s separate chain of command, and unite the Party to fight Chiang, with great success. For the first time, the Red Army defeated the Generalissimo’s crack troops in battles involving tens of thousands of men. Chiang’s latest annihilation expedition folded in March 1933.

DURING THIS FOURTH campaign, Chiang had to fight the Reds against the background of a deepening national crisis. In February 1933 the Japanese had thrust out of Manchuria across the Great Wall into north China proper, threatening Peking. That same month the Japanese set up a puppet state called Manchukuo in the northeast.

Ruijin also won this fourth campaign thanks to great help from the Soviet Union, which had just restored diplomatic relations with Chiang, in December 1932. Restoring formal ties allowed Russia to get more intelligence officers back into China under diplomatic and press cover, to help the Chinese Communists. The Russian military attaché, GRU Major-General Eduard Lepin, played a central role, as he regularly saw Chiang and top Nationalist officers, and could pass high-level up-to-date information to the Chinese Red Army, also acting as liaison between it and the military advisory group for the CCP in Moscow. Moscow’s secret military advisers in China also had a big hand in the war. When Mao later met one of them, the German Communist Otto Braun (the only one who got through to Ruijin), Mao paid him a compliment. After Mao greeted him “with stiff formality,” Braun recorded, “Mao acknowledg[ed] the successful counter-offensive … in the winter of 1932–33. He said he knew that the impetus for it came from me …”

The main military figure on the Chinese Red side during this fourth campaign was Chou En-lai, and the fact that the Reds were winning unprecedented victories under his leadership greatly boosted Chou’s status and confidence. Mao knew that Moscow recognized winners, and Chou’s military triumph could well tip Moscow in Chou’s favor — especially as Mao had opposed Moscow’s war strategy in the first place. So in February 1933 Mao moved back to Ruijin from his “convalescence,” and started to be cooperative. Moscow continued to accord him unique care and attention, repeatedly admonishing his colleagues that they “must incorporate Mao in work at all cost … Regarding Mao Tse-tung, you must try your utmost to adopt an attitude of tolerance and conciliation …”

Mao went on taking part in top meetings and chairing those to which his post entitled him. He was kept fully briefed and retained his elite privileges. But he knew that Moscow had reservations about him — not least from the way that his acolytes were denounced in the Red newspapers. He could also read the strength of the wind that was blowing against him in the startling degree of his own isolation. Hardly anyone came to visit him. His followers avoided him. Sometimes, his wife recalled, he did not exchange a word with anyone outside his family for days. Mao was to say decades later that it was as if he had been “soaked in a piss barrel, and been sloshed up and down several times, so I really stank.”

A further indication of the way he had slipped in Moscow’s favor came early in 1934, when he lost his position as “premier”—while retaining the grander one of “president.” The main duty of the premier was to run the administration, which Mao could not be bothered to do; and the Party wanted someone in the post who would actually do the job. An ambitious thirty-four-year-old called Lo Fu, who had been trained in Russia, took his place. Mao was compensated by being made a full member of the Politburo for the first time since 1923, but he did not get into the inner core of the Party, the Secretariat. He was not on the list approved by Moscow. Mao boycotted the Party plenum that implemented these decisions, claiming illness. Another “diplomatic disorder,” Po Ku remarked, but let him be.

Mao was still given a high profile and maximum exposure in CCP and Moscow publications. To the population in the Red area — and to the outside world, including the Nationalists — Mao was still “the Chairman.” But in private, Po Ku compared him to Russia’s figurehead president. “Old Mao is going to be just a Kalinin now,” he told a friend. “Ha, ha!”

On 15 April the Communists issued a “declaration of war on Japan.” This was a pure propaganda stunt, and it was more than five years before the Red Army fired a shot at the Japanese (except in Manchuria, where the Party organization came under the control of Moscow, not Ruijin) — making this one of the longest “phoney wars” in history. In fact, the CCP’s proclamation was more a declaration of war on Chiang Kai-shek than on Japan, as it asserted that “in order to … fight the Japanese imperialists, it is necessary first of all to overthrow the rule of the Nationalists.” In secret intra-CCP communications, there was not a single reference to Japan as the enemy.

^†The mutineers belonged to a unit of 17,000 men whose commander had brought them over to the Reds from Ningdu in December 1931. This was the only mutiny in the Communists’ favor since Nanchang in 1927—and for many years to come. These newcomers increased the Red Army’s strength in the Fujian — Jiangxi theater by one-third, to over 50,000 men. Their commander, Ji Zhen-tong, quickly realized what he had let himself and his army in for, and asked “to go to the Soviet Union for studies”—the only pretext he could give to get away. He was soon arrested, and later executed.

The Party was no longer able to operate underground in any city in the White areas, as a result of effective Nationalist policing plus massive defections. In history books this failure is blamed, unfairly, on Li Li-san, the all-purpose scapegoat.

Apart from Japan, the only states that recognized it were El Salvador, the Vatican and the Soviet Union, where the Manchukuo flag flew over consulates at Chita and Vladivostok. This was part of an attempt by Stalin to appease Tokyo, to try to prevent it turning north to attack the Soviet Union.

11. HOW MAO GOT ONTO THE LONG MARCH (1933–34 AGE 39–40)

IN SEPTEMBER 1933, Chiang Kai-shek mobilized half a million troops for yet another “annihilation expedition”—his fifth — against the Ruijin base. In May he had agreed to a truce with the Japanese, acquiescing to their seizure of parts of north China, in addition to Manchuria, and this freed him to concentrate in strength against the Reds.

Over the previous months Chiang had been building solid roads that enabled his troops to mass in the area and bring up supplies. With this logistic preparation, Chiang was now able to close in on the Red area. The armies then pushed into the Red base slowly, pausing every couple of kilometers to construct small forts that stood so close together they could virtually be connected by machine-gun fire. The Reds were tightly encircled by these blockhouses. As their commander, Peng De-huai, described it, Chiang was forcing the Red area “to shrink gradually: the tactics of drying the pond and then getting the fish.”

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.

As the Nationalists were coming, it made no sense to leave the haul buried in a cave. Now was the time to cash it in — for a ticket on the evacuation. The Party was desperate for funds for the journey, and had been begging Moscow to send more money. Mao delivered his cache and also promised Po Ku that he would behave. Po agreed to take him along. He may not have had much choice, as Mao had physically planted himself astride the departure point.

At the last minute Xiang Ying, the relatively moderate “vice-president” of the Red state, was designated to head the stay-behinds. Xiang was the only person in the leadership from a working-class background, and he accepted the job without demur, demonstrating a spirit of self-sacrifice rare among his peers. He did, however, express grave concern about Mao going with the leadership. Xiang had had ample experience of Mao’s character in the Red base, where he had arrived in 1931 at the height of Mao’s slaughter of the Jiangxi Communists, and was convinced that Mao would stop at nothing in his pursuit of personal power. Xiang had tried, unsuccessfully, to protect the Jiangxi Reds. Mao loathed him, and had forced torture victims to denounce him. Chou En-lai told the Comintern that “people arrested testified that [Xiang Ying] … belonged to AB.” Aleksandr Panyushkin, later the Russian ambassador to China, said straight out that Mao had tried to get rid of Xiang Ying by labeling him “AB”: “Only the intervention of the Politburo prevented Mao from doing away with Xiang Ying.” At Ningdu in 1932, Xiang had been one of those most insistent on having Mao sacked from his army command. Mao’s intense hatred was to lead to Xiang’s death ten years later.

Xiang argued strongly against taking Mao along. Otto Braun recalled that Xiang “made distinct allusions to the terrorist line of Mao Tse-tung and his persecution of loyal Party cadres in about 1930. He warned against underestimating the seriousness of Mao’s partisan struggle against the Party leadership. His [Mao’s] temporary restraint was due only to tactical considerations. He … would avail himself of the first opportunity to seize exclusive control of Army and Party.” But Po Ku, according to Braun, seemed optimistic: “He said … [he] had talked this over with Mao and was positive that he would not consider provoking a crisis of leadership …”

Mao had indeed begun to behave. Until July, when he was camping at the southern front, he had carped at the leadership’s instructions at every turn, telling officers to disobey orders and issuing his own, countermanding the Party’s. When one of Mao’s acolytes told him that he had been appointed land minister in one place, Mao told him to go to a quite different place and do a different job: “You are not going to be the land minister there. Go to Huichang County to be government chairman there.”

But, come September, everything changed. When Lin Biao, who had been used to Mao running down the leadership, paid him a visit, Lin’s companion noticed that far from “being engaged in factional activities on the sly,” Mao was “very disciplined.”

WHEN THE NEWS reached him in Yudu that he was definitely going to be taken along, Mao sent for his wife. No children could go, so their two-year-old son, Little Mao, had to be left behind. Mao never saw him again.

Little Mao had been born in November 1932, and was Mao’s second child with Gui-yuan. Their first child, a daughter, had been lost. She had been born in June 1929, in the city of Longyan in Fujian, in a particularly lovely house. When the baby was shown to him, Mao had produced one of his characteristic cracks: “Hey, this girl knows how to pick a good date: she wouldn’t come out till she found a nice place!” Less than a month after she was born, Gui-yuan had to leave the town with Mao, and the baby was left with a local wet nurse. Mao’s path then took the couple away from the city for nearly three years. When Gui-yuan finally returned, she was told the girl had died, but she could not bring herself to believe this, and after the Communists took power two decades later she began to look for her. The quest went on obsessively for decades until near the end of her life in 1984.

As Gui-yuan could not bring Little Mao along on the evacuation, she entrusted the boy to her sister, who was married to Mao’s brother Tse-tan. The couple, as well as her brother and parents, were left behind. Gui-yuan wept bitterly at being parted from her son. (Her third child, a son, had died a few months earlier within days of being born.) Little Mao stayed with his wet nurse for a while. After the Nationalists took the Red territory, Tse-tan moved him secretly. But Tse-tan was killed in battle in April 1935 before he could tell his wife where.

Once Mao came to power, Gui-yuan, who had by then long ceased to be Mao’s wife, tried desperately to find Little Mao, with tragic results. Her sister, who felt guilty about Little Mao being lost while in her care, was killed in a car accident in November 1949 as she set off one night to chase a lead, within days of the Reds taking the area. In 1952 a young man was found who might possibly have been Little Mao. Gui-yuan’s brother recalled that Gui-yuan “rushed to identify him. She mainly checked two things, whether the boy had oily ears, and whether he had armpit odour [uncommon for Chinese]. She was convinced her children all inherited these characteristics of Mao Tse-tung’s. After inspecting him, she was convinced it was her Little Mao.”

But many other Communist women who had had to abandon their children had embarked on the same kind of quest, and one Red Army widow had already identified the boy as her son. The Party adjudicated that the boy belonged to this other woman. Gui-yuan’s brother went to see Mao, who had not been involved up to now, and showed him a photograph of the teenage boy, hinting that Gui-yuan would like Mao to intervene. But Mao declined, saying: “It’s awkward for me to interfere.” Mao told him to do what the Party decreed. Gui-yuan did not give up, and fought a painful — and tragic — battle for years. She and her brother kept in touch with the young man until his death from liver cancer in the 1970s, even taking care of his wedding arrangements.

MAO SHOWED NO particular sadness about leaving Little Mao behind, and did not even say goodbye to his son. His sorrow was reserved for himself. Gong Chu, the commander of the Red Army at Yudu, left a telling account of the last weeks before Mao departed, when Mao was staked out in his HQ. In early September Gong was studying a map when

suddenly my bodyguard came in and announced: “Chairman Mao is here!” I … ran to the front gate, and saw Mao Tse-tung with two bodyguards dismounting … He looked yellow and drained. I asked him: “Is the Chairman not well?” He answered: “You are right. I have recently been suffering from ill health, but more of a pain is that I feel extremely down …”

After he washed his face, he lit a cigarette and said: “… I’ll be here for quite a while.”

Mao said to Gong that as they were old friends from the outlaw land, “ ‘I hope you can come and have a chat whenever you have the time in the evenings.’ … Mao Tse-tung liked talking.” Gong took Mao up on his invitation, and after Gui-yuan joined Mao, she would “prepare delicious suppers. And the three of us would chat and drink and smoke, often … till midnight … From my observation, Mao’s place was not visited by other people except me … It really felt as if he was isolated and miserable.”

One day Gong bought a hen and some pigs’ trotters for dinner. Mao was “cheerful, and drank a lot.” He complained about the leadership, but more as a heart-to-heart between old friends than as sabotage. When Gong mentioned he had been given a reprimand for something, Mao “said he had not been in agreement with the reprimand. It was all because Chou En-lai was too harsh … Also, he said, [his Party foes] wanted all power in their hands … He seemed deeply resentful of them.”

Mao became doleful from drink, and recounted the various punishments visited on him. At one point, lamenting that he was no longer the big boss, “tears ran down his cheeks. He was coughing from time to time, and his face looked drawn and dried and sallow. Under the flicker of a tiny oil lamp, he was quite a picture of dejection.”

Neither the collapse of the Communist state nor the separation from his son could wound Mao like his loss of personal power.

Then, just when everything seemed set, Mao’s plans nearly fell apart. Days before the planned departure, his temperature shot up to 105.8°F and he grew delirious with malaria. It was the malaria season, and the mosquitoes in Yudu were so thick in the air that they flew right into people’s nostrils. Even quinine failed to do the trick. It was vital for him to recover — and recover fast, so that he could leave with the others. The best doctor in the Red area, Nelson Fu, who had looked after Mao in the missionary hospital in winter 1932–33, raced over from Ruijin and got him into good enough shape to travel. Patient and doctor both knew Fu had saved Mao’s life — and his political fortunes.

Dr Fu became the overseer of Mao’s physicians for decades. In 1966, in Mao’s Great Purge, he wrote to Mao and brought up this episode in Yudu. “I saved your life,” he said, “I hope you can save mine now.” The then 72-year-old had been savagely beaten, his ribs broken and his skull fractured. Mao did lift a finger, but not very forcefully, by minuting on Fu’s letter: “This man … has not committed big crimes, perhaps he should be spared.” But then he heard that Fu had allegedly talked to other Party leaders about his (Mao’s) health, which was a big taboo for Mao. Mao let Fu be thrown into prison. The septuagenarian doctor did not last two weeks, and died on the floor of his cell.

MEANWHILE THE RED ARMY kept up a fighting retreat as Chiang’s army advanced, while preparations for the evacuation went on in secret. The move was forced, but it enabled the Reds to carry out a strategic shift towards the northwest, with the ultimate goal of reaching Russian-controlled borders, in order to receive arms — an operation later known as “to link up with the Soviet Union.” It had been planned for years. Back in 1929 GRU chief Berzin had briefed Sorge that his mission was to try to get the Chinese Red Army to the Soviet border.

In July, one unit of 6,000 men was sent out in the opposite direction as a decoy. It carried 1.6 million leaflets, which filled 300 shoulder-pole loads, and adopted the grandiose name of “Red Army Vanguard Northbound to Fight the Japanese.” Its movements were given maximum publicity, and the unit came to realize that it was a decoy, something that even its leaders had not been told. The men felt bitter, and doubly so because the task assigned was pointless: a small unit like theirs could not possibly fool the enemy or draw them away from Ruijin. Instead, they found themselves being relentlessly pursued by other Nationalist forces. Within a few months, virtually the entire decoy force was wiped out.

Part of the preparation for the evacuation was screening all proposed evacuees, a process run by Chou En-lai. Those rated unreliable were executed. They totaled thousands. Among those killed were most of the teachers in army schools, who were often captured former Nationalist officers. The executions took place in a sealed-off mountain valley, where a huge pit was dug. The victims were hacked to death with knives, and their bodies kicked down into the pit. When this pit was full, the rest were made to dig their own holes in the ground, and were then hacked to death, or buried alive.

The massacre was carried out by the state security system — although many security men had themselves by now lost faith in the regime and were being killed in their turn. One of those who had lost faith was the head of the team guarding the Military Council. In the confusion of leaving, he slipped away and hid in the hills. But the authorities found his hiding-place by arresting his girlfriend, a local peasant. After a gun battle, this expert marksman shot himself.

IN OCTOBER 1934, the rule of this brutal regime came to an end. At Yudu, pontoon bridges were set up across the river. At the prow and stem of each boat hung a barn lantern, and more lanterns and torches shone on both banks, glowing in the water’s reflection. Families of the soldiers and organized peasants lined the banks to say goodbye. The badly wounded had been billeted on local families. As troops padded past on the cobblestone path underneath the city wall, down to the crossing point, in a corner house near the wall a twelve-year-old boy had his eyes glued to a crack in the door, holding his breath. His father, a small shopkeeper, had been killed four years before, at the height of Mao’s AB slaughter, when people were being executed even for being “active shop-assistants.” Like many others, he was glad to see the back of the Reds, as he made abundantly clear when we met him sixty years later.

At about 6:00 PM on 18 October, looking gaunt but composed, with his long hair combed back, Mao left the local Party HQ surrounded by bodyguards, crossed the street, passed the Sung-dynasty archway and stepped onto the pontoon bridge.

This rickety bridge did not just carry Mao across the water, it bore him into legend. His murderous past and that of the CCP regime were about to be left behind. And Mao himself was about to create the most enduring myth in modern Chinese history, and one of the biggest myths of the twentieth century—“the Long March.”

Moscow’s monthly subsidy to the CCP for 1934 was 7,418 “gold dollars.” The Russians tried to send in arms direct, but the Chinese Red Army was unable to fulfill Moscow’s recommendation to establish a foothold at a port, where “contraband munitions and medicine could be transported.”

This sort of tragedy was by no means uncommon. The revolution brought much heartache to its adherents. Before they took power, Communists were expected not just to make sacrifices vis-à-vis their children, but literally to sacrifice them, and selling one’s children — or having them sold — to raise funds for the Party was not uncommon. The Party cell of Gui-yuan’s friend Zeng Zhi in Amoy sold her baby son for 100 yuan; the buyer paid in advance and the Party spent the money before presenting her with a fait accompli. More than half a century later, she said: “Of course, it was extremely painful. Before my son was delivered to [the buyer’s] house, my husband and I carried him to Sun Yat-sen Park to play. He was such a cute baby, over 40 days, he smiled all the time. We gave him the name Tie-niu (Iron Ox). He never cried without a good reason, and rarely passed stool or water on himself. So we carried him there to play. He was really really happy. Then he was gone. And it was just unbearable. I managed to overcome the hurt. But my baby died 26 days later … Our Party Secretary didn’t dare to tell me, although I had heard. He kept quiet as I didn’t say anything. Sometimes at night, it hurt so much I wept, but quietly, because it was embarrassing to let others know [that she was crying for her child]. Then one day, he saw I had been crying, and he guessed I knew, and he apologised to me.”

Red leaders acknowledged later that the name was only for propaganda. “No one dreamed of a march north to fight the Japanese,” Braun observed.

12. LONG MARCH I: CHIANG LETS THE REDS GO (1934 AGE 40)

SOME 80,000 PEOPLE set off on the Long March in October 1934. The procession moved out over a ten-day period in three columns, with the two oldest and core units, under Lin Biao and Peng De-huai respectively, on each side of the HQ. The 5,000-strong HQ consisted of the handful of leaders and their staff, servants and guards. Mao was with the HQ.

They moved slowly due west, burdened by heavy loads. Arsenal machinery, printing machines and Mao’s treasure were carried on shoulder-poles by thousands of porters, most of them recently press-ganged conscripts, watched over by security men. The chief of the administrators revealed that the heaviest burdens were carried by people “who had just been released from the hard labour teams, and they were very weak physically … some just collapsed and died while walking.” Numerous marchers fell sick. One remembered:

The autumn rain went on and on, making our paths nothing but mud … and there was nowhere to escape the rain, and no good sleep to be had … some sick and weak fell asleep and never woke up. Many suffered infected feet, which had to be wrapped in rotten cloth and produced unbearable pain when stepping on the ground … As we left the base area further and further behind, some labourers deserted. The more obedient ones begged in tears to be let go …

The bolder ones simply dropped their loads and fled when their minders were distracted. Soldiers, too, deserted in droves, as the vigilance of their increasingly exhausted bosses wavered.

The marchers faced the daunting prospect of four lines of blockhouses — the same blockhouses that had doomed their Red base. Yet these turned out to be no obstacle at all — seemingly inexplicably.

The first line was manned by Cantonese troops, whose warlord chief had been doing profitable business with the Reds and had promised to let them through. Which he did. This combat-free breakout, however, was not due just to the anti-Chiang Cantonese. The Generalissimo was well aware that the Reds intended to pull out by way of the Cantonese front, and moreover he knew that they were going to be let through. On 3 October, shortly before the breakout began, he had told his prime minister that the Cantonese were going to “open up one side of the net” to the Reds. And yet Chiang explicitly rejected the idea of sending forces loyal to himself to the breakout sector. A close aide argued with him that to get Canton “to carry out orders, we have to have our men on the spot.” Chiang told him not to worry.

The marchers reached the second line of blockhouses at the beginning of November. Although the columns offered an easy target, extending over tens of kilometers, they were not attacked. The Cantonese again made no trouble. And neither did the other force defending part of this second line, which was under General Ho Chien, the fiercely anti-Communist Hunanese who had executed Mao’s ex-wife Kai-hui.

It was the same story at the third fortified line; yet Chiang not only did not reprimand Ho Chien for his apparent dereliction, on 12 November he promoted him to commander-in-chief of operations against the marchers. So it was this fierce anti-Communist who manned the fourth fortification line, situated at an ideal place to wipe out the Reds, on the west bank of the Xiang, the largest river in Hunan (which had inspired Mao’s poetry in his youth). There were no bridges, and the Reds, who had no anti-aircraft guns, had to wade across the wide river, easy targets from land and air. But again they went completely unmolested while they took four days to trudge across, spread along a stretch of river 30 km long. The commanding points on the banks were unmanned, and the troops under Ho Chien just looked on. Chiang’s planes circled overhead, but only to reconnoiter, and there was no aerial bombing or even strafing. Mao and the HQ forded the river undisturbed on 30 November, and by the next day, 1 December, the 40,000-strong main Red force was over.

Only now did Chiang, who had been monitoring the crossing “with total concentration,” his aides observed, seal off the river and order heavy bombing. Part of the Red rear guard was cut off on the east bank. The marchers who got across were down to half their original number, but included the main combat troops and the HQ. Chiang knew this. His commander Ho Chien wrote the following day: “The main force of the bandits have all [crossed the river], and are fleeing to the west.”

There can be no doubt that Chiang let the CCP leadership and the main force of the Red Army escape.

WHY SHOULD CHIANG have done this? Part of the reason soon emerged when, after the crossing of the Xiang, Chiang’s army drove the marchers farther westward towards the province of Guizhou, and then Sichuan. Chiang’s plan was to use the Red force for his own purposes. These two provinces, together with neighboring Yunnan, formed a vast southwestern region covering well over 1 million sq km, with a population of about 100 million; they were virtually independent of the central government, as they kept their own armies and paid little tax to Nanjing. Sichuan was particularly important, being the largest, richest and most populous, with some 50 million people. It was shielded on all sides by almost inaccessible mountains, which made access “more difficult than ascending to the blue sky,” in the words of the poet Li Po. Chiang envisaged it as “the base for national revival,” i.e., a safe rear for an eventual war against Japan.

Chiang could effect control only if he had his own army actually in the provinces, but they had rejected his army, and if he were to try to force his way in, there would be war. Chiang did not want to have to declare war openly on the warlords. His nation-building design was more Machiavellian — and cost-effective. He wanted to drive the Red Army into these hold-out provinces, so that their warlords would be so frightened of the Reds settling in their territory that they would allow Chiang’s army in to drive the Reds out. This way, Chiang figured, his army could march in and he could impose central government control. He wanted to preserve the main body of the Red Army so that it would still pose enough of a threat to the warlords.

Chiang spelled out his plan to his closest secretary: “Now when the Communist army go into Guizhou, we can follow in. It is better than us starting a war to conquer Guizhou. Sichuan and Yunnan will have to welcome us, to save themselves … From now on, if we play our cards right … we can create a unified country.” On 27 November, the very day the Reds started crossing the Xiang River and headed for Guizhou, Chiang issued his blueprint for nation-building, a “Declaration on the division of powers between the central government and the provinces.”

This agenda remained secret throughout Chiang’s life, and is still concealed by both Nationalist and Communist official histories. Both attribute the Communists’ escape to regional warlords, with Chiang blaming the warlords, and the Communists praising them. Both share the same concern: not to reveal that it was the Generalissimo himself who let the Reds go. For the Nationalists, Chiang’s methods for establishing his sway over the wayward provinces were too devious, and his miscalculation about using the Reds — which ultimately led to their triumph — too humiliating. For the Communists, it is embarrassing to acknowledge that the famed Long March was to a large extent steered by Chiang Kai-shek.

LETTING THE REDS go was also a goodwill gesture on Chiang’s part towards Russia. He needed a harmonious relationship with the Kremlin because he was under threat from Japan. And the CCP was Moscow’s baby.

But there was another, more secret and totally private reason. Chiang’s son Ching-kuo had been a hostage in Russia for nine years. Ching-kuo was Chiang Kai-shek’s sole blood descendant, not by the famous Mme Chiang, but by his first wife. After Ching-kuo was born, Chiang seems to have become sterile through contracting venereal disease several times, and he adopted another son, Weigo. But Ching-kuo, as the only blood heir, remained the closest to his heart. Chiang was steeped in Chinese tradition, in which the central concern was to have an heir. To fail to carry on the family line was regarded as the disgrace, the greatest hurt one could inflict on one’s parents and ancestors, whose dead souls could then never rest in peace. One of the worst curses in China was: “May you have no heir!” And respect for one’s parents and ancestors, filial piety, was the primary moral injunction dictated by tradition.

In 1925, Chiang had sent Ching-kuo, then fifteen years old, to a school in Peking. This was a time when Chiang’s star was ascending in a Nationalist Party that was sponsored by Moscow. In no time, the Russians were on to Ching-kuo, and invited him to study in Russia. The young man was very keen. A few months after he arrived in Peking, Ching-kuo was taken to Moscow by a little-known but pivotal figure called Shao Li-tzu, who was a key Red mole inside the Nationalist Party.

Planting moles was one of the most priceless gifts that Moscow bequeathed to the CCP. Mostly these moles joined the Nationalists in the first half of the 1920s, when Sun Yat-sen, who was courting the Russians, opened his party to the Communists. Infiltration worked on several levels. As well as overt Communists working inside the Nationalist movement, as Mao did, there were also secret Communists, and then a third group, those who had staged fake defections from the CCP. When Chiang split from the Communists in 1927, a large number of these secret agents stayed as “sleepers,” to be activated at the appropriate time. For the next twenty years and more, they were not only able to give the Reds crucial intelligence, they were often in a position to have a substantial influence on policy, as many had meanwhile risen very high in the Nationalist system. Ultimately, the agents played a gigantic role in helping deliver China to Mao — probably a greater role in high-level politics than in any other country in the world. Many remain unexposed even today.

Shao Li-tzu was one of them. He was actually a founding member of the CCP, but on Moscow’s orders he stayed away from Party activities, and his identity was kept secret even from most Party leaders. When Chiang turned against the Communists in Shanghai in April 1927, Shao wrote the Russians a telegram that was instantly forwarded to Stalin, asking for instructions: “Shanghai disturbs me very much. I cannot be the weapon of counter-revolution. I ask for advice how to fight.”

For the next twenty-two years, Shao stayed with the Nationalists, occupying many key posts — until the Communist victory in 1949, when he went over to Mao. He died in Peking in 1967. Even under Communist rule, his true face was never revealed, and he is still presented today as an honest sympathizer, not a long-term sleeper.

It was undoubtedly on Moscow’s instructions that Shao had brought Chiang’s son to Russia in November 1925. When Ching-kuo completed his studies there, in 1927, he was not allowed to leave, and was forced to denounce his father publicly. Stalin was keeping him hostage while telling the world that he had volunteered to stay. Stalin liked to hold hostages. Peggy Dennis, the wife of the US Communist leader Eugene Dennis, described a visit from the Comintern éminence grise Dmitri Manuilsky as she and her husband were about to leave Russia to return to America in 1935: “The bombshell was dropped quietly … Almost casually, Manuilsky informed us that we could not take Tim [their son] back, ‘… We will send him at some other time, under other circumstances.’ ” The Russians never did.

The fact that Ching-kuo was a hostage was spelled out to his father in late 1931—by none other than his own sister-in-law, Mme Sun Yat-sen (née Soong Ching-ling), who was another Soviet agent. Speaking for Moscow, she proposed swapping Ching-kuo for two top Russian agents who had recently been arrested in Shanghai. Chiang turned the swap down. The arrest of the two agents was a public affair, and they had been openly tried and imprisoned. But Moscow’s offer unleashed a torrent of anguish in Chiang, who thought his son might now be “cruelly put to death by Soviet Russians.” On 3 December 1931 the Generalissimo wrote in his diary: “In the past few days, I have been yearning for my son even more. How can I face my parents when I die [if Ching-kuo is killed]?” On the 14th: “I have committed a great crime by being unfilial [by risking the death of his heir] …”

Chiang continued to be consumed by anxiety about what might happen to his son, and his anguish and bitterness almost certainly explain an event that happened thousands of kilometers away. At exactly this time, December 1931, Shao Li-tzu’s son was found shot dead in Rome. This son had been taken by Shao to Russia in 1925 as Ching-kuo’s traveling companion. But, unlike Ching-kuo, Shao junior was later allowed to return to China. The Italian press covered this death as a lovers’ tragedy, one paper running the story under the headline “The tragic end of a Chinese who had wounded his lover”—a woman reported as Czech. But Shao and his family were convinced that the murder of his son, which has been covered up by both Nationalist and Communist parties, was carried out by Nationalist agents, and this could only have been done with Chiang’s authorization, as personal vengeance: a son for a son.

By the time the Long March began, Chiang had devised a carefully crafted swap: the survival of the CCP for Ching-kuo. It was not an offer that could be spelled out. He executed his plan in subtle ways. His scheme was to keep the Reds temporarily confined, and then use the Japanese to break them. Chiang regarded war with Japan as inevitable, and was well aware that Russia wanted this war. Stalin’s most dreaded scenario was that Japan would conquer China, and then, with China’s resources and a porous 7,000-kilometer border, would attack the Soviet Union. Chiang reckoned that once the Sino-Japanese war started, Moscow would be bound to order its Chinese clients to get active against Japan. Until that day, Chiang would allow the Reds to survive, which he hoped would be a big enough quid pro quo to get his son back.

Chiang did not want the Reds to cling on in the rich heartland of China. His aim was to drive them into a more barren and sparsely populated corner, where he could box them in. The prison he had in mind was the Yellow Earth Plateau in northwest China, mainly the northern part of Shaanxi province. To make absolutely sure that the Reds would walk into his fold, Chiang allowed a Communist base to flourish there, while vigorously stamping out the others elsewhere in China.

The main person Chiang used to implement this scheme was none other than Shao Li-tzu, the man who had taken Chiang’s son to Russia. Shao was appointed governor of Shaanxi in April 1933. Though Chiang certainly knew Shao’s true colors, he never exposed him, and continued to use him as if he were a bona fide Nationalist. Chiang’s relationship with Shao, as with many other key moles, was an almost unbelievably complex web of intrigue, deceit, bluff and double-bluff that eventually was to spin out of his control and contribute to his downfall.

Chiang’s calculation was that only a mole could foster a Red pocket, as any authentic Nationalist would destroy it. And, indeed, it was only after Shao was appointed to the area that what had hitherto been a tiny Red guerrilla operation began to grow in Shaanxi (and the edge of Gansu immediately to the west). At the exact moment the Long March began, in mid-October 1934, Chiang came to Shaanxi province for a visit. While publicly calling for the Red “bandits” to be “wiped out,” he allowed the Red base to expand in an unprecedented manner; inside a few months, it had grown to cover 30,000 sq km, with a population of 900,000.

What Chiang had created was a corral into which he would herd all the different detachments of the Red Army as he drove them out of their various pockets in the heartland of China. His plan was to weaken them significantly along the way, but not kill them off entirely. Chiang later told an American emissary: “I drove the Communists from Jiangxi to … northern Shaanxi, where their number was reduced to a few thousands and they were left unpursued.”

The way he steered them was by communicating his own deployments by radio, which he knew would be intercepted. The Reds found that “enemy telegrams were constantly intercepted and decoded by us, and our army knew the intentions and movements of the enemy like the back of our hand.” But Chiang declined to change his codes. And the Reds went where there were no enemy troops, or very few.

In order to make sure that the Reds followed the route he had mapped out, and to rule out any change in their instructions, Chiang decided the eve of the Reds’ departure was the moment to cash in a huge intelligence coup. In June the Nationalists had covertly raided the CCP’s Shanghai radio station, which had been the link between Ruijin and Moscow. For several months, the Nationalists kept the station operating under their control, and then in October they shut it down altogether. The CCP tried to re-establish a link by sending a top radio operator to Shanghai, but he defected as soon as he arrived. Assassins were sent after him. They missed the first time, but managed to kill him in his bed in a German hospital at the second attempt. From now on, Shanghai became largely irrelevant to the CCP, although it remained an important base for Moscow’s secret services.

THE LONG MARCH was used by Chiang to initiate his Reds-for-son swap. Just before the breakout from the Ruijin base, he sent a request through diplomatic channels asking for his son to be returned. On 2 September 1934 he recorded in his diary that “a formal representation has been made about getting Ching-kuo home.” During the crucial period of the breakout in October — November, Chiang found a way of emphatically telling the Russians he was closing his eyes and letting the Reds go, by not merely absenting himself from the front line, but heading off a thousand kilometers in the opposite direction for a very long forty-day public tour of North China.

Moscow understood the message. During the precise period between Chiang requesting his son’s release and the day Mao and Co. crossed the Xiang River and were free of Chiang’s blockhouses, Moscow dramatically increased surveillance of its hostage. Ching-kuo, who had previously worked in a village and a Siberian gold mine, was now working in a machinery plant in the Urals. Then, as he later recounted, “from August to November 1934, I was suddenly … placed under the close surveillance of the Russian NKVD [KGB]. Every day I was shadowed by two men.”

At the beginning of December, just after the Chinese Reds walked past the last blockhouses, Chiang asked for his son again (as the KGB informed Ching-kuo). But the Russians told Chiang that his son did not wish to return. “There is no end to the Russian enemy’s revolting deceit,” Chiang wrote in his diary, although he said he could “cope with it calmly.”

“I feel I have indeed made progress since I can even shrug off this family calamity.” Chiang knew his son would be safe — if he did more for the Reds.

Of the other half (amounting to some 40,000), who did not make it past the river, “over 3,000” were killed at the Xiang. The rest were either scattered at the Xiang, or had perished during the preceding six weeks’ trek from illness or exhaustion, or had been casualties of small skirmishes, or had deserted.

She was the sister of Mme Chiang Kai-shek. The fact that she was a Russian agent remained a secret throughout her long life, and remains little-known to this day. But a secret letter she wrote on 26 January 1937 to Wang Ming, the head of the CCP delegation in Moscow, and her controller, shows her role beyond any doubt. The letter opens: “To Comrade Wang Ming. Dear Comrade: It is necessary for me to inform you the following facts since they may endanger my activities … in China in the near future. I place them before your consideration in the hope that you will advise me as to what course to pursue …” One of the points in her letter was complaints about the American Comintern agent Agnes Smedley, who, Mme Sun said, brought “foreign sympathizers home, with the result that this special house which has been used for important purposes now has been ruined … I forwarded your instructions to isolate her” to the CCP.

The Nationalist army commander in Shaanxi was a fellow traveler called General Yang Hu-cheng, who had earlier asked to join the Communist Party, and whose relationship to the Reds was known to Chiang. He collaborated well with Shao.

13. LONG MARCH II: THE POWER BEHIND THE THRONE (1934–35 AGE 40–41)

BY MID-DECEMBER, Chiang had steered the Long March into Guizhou, the first province he wanted to bring under control. As he had foreseen, the arrival of a Red Army 40,000 strong threw the local warlord into a panic. Chiang “has long wanted to take over Guizhou,” the warlord recalled feeling at the time. “Now, the Central Government Army is coming hot on the heels of the Red Army, and I could not possibly turn him down … I was really in turmoil. Under the circumstances, I decided to place myself under Chiang’s command.” On 19 December, eight divisions of the Central Government Army marched into the provincial capital and at once started building an airport and roads. Soon afterwards, they took over key positions and, as the warlord put it, “turned themselves from guests into masters.”

Chiang then funneled the Red Army northward to his next target, Sichuan, by blocking off other routes while leaving this passage wide open. Chiang’s plan was to repeat his Guizhou takeover here, and then propel the Reds farther north into Shaanxi. But here things began to deviate from the planned scenario, as Mao started to behave in ways Chiang could not have predicted. Mao was determined not to move into Sichuan. His motive, however, had nothing to do with Chiang, but with his struggle for power within his own Party.

Mao had started taking active steps to seize the leadership of his Party once the marchers entered Guizhou. This required splitting his Party foes from within. In particular, he had been cultivating two key men with whom he had not previously been on the best of terms: Wang Jia-xiang, nicknamed the “Red Prof,” and Lo Fu, the man who had taken away his job as “prime minister.” Mao had crossed swords with them in the past, but now he buttered them up, as they both had grudges against Party No. 1 Po Ku.

The two had been students in Moscow with Po, who was the younger man but had leapfrogged over both of them to become their boss, and had sometimes excluded them from decision-making. Po “sidelined me,” Lo Fu said years later, and this drove Lo into Mao’s arms. “I felt I was put in a position completely without power, which I resented bitterly,” Lo recalled. “I remember one day before the departure, comrade Tse-tung had a chat with me, and I told him all my resentment without reserve. From then on, I became close to comrade Tse-tung. He asked me to stick together with him and comrade Wang Jia-xiang — so that way a trio was formed, headed by comrade Mao.”

The trio traveled together, usually reclining on litters. Bamboo litters were authorized for a few leaders, each of whom was also entitled to a horse, and porters to carry their belongings. For much of the Long March, including the most grueling part of the trek, most of them were carried. Mao had even designed his own transportation. Mrs. Lo Fu recalled him making preparations with the Red Prof, and showing off his ingenuity. “He said: ‘Look, we have designed our own litters … we will be carried.’ He and Jia-xiang looked rather pleased with themselves showing me their ‘works of art’: their kind of litter had very long bamboo poles so it would be easier and lighter to carry climbing mountains. It had a tarpaulin awning … so [the passenger] would be shielded from the sun and the rain.”

Mao himself told his staff decades later: “On the March, I was lying in a litter. So what did I do? I read. I read a lot.” It was not so easy for the carriers. Marchers remembered: “When climbing mountains, the litter-bearers sometimes could only move forward on their knees, and the skin and flesh on their knees were rubbed raw before they got to the top. Each mountain climbed left a trail of their sweat and blood.”

Wafted on other men’s shoulders, Mao plotted a coup with Po Ku’s two jealous colleagues. When the road was wide enough, they talked side by side; and on narrow paths, when they had to go in single file, they arranged their litters so that their heads were together. One meeting was held in an orange grove, golden with ripe fruit hanging among bright green leaves. The litter-bearers were taking a break, and had laid down their burdens next to each other. The trio decided to work together to “throw out” Po, along with Braun, the German adviser, and give Mao control of the army. As Mao was still very unpopular, and was not even a member of the Secretariat, the core body, he did not shoot for the top Party slot at this stage. That position was earmarked for Lo Fu, the only member of the trio who was in the Secretariat. The Red Prof’s reward would be full Politburo membership. The trio started to lobby for a meeting to discuss how the Reds had lost their state.

Po Ku consented to a post-mortem. In fact, he had been feeling so bad about the Reds’ failure that his colleagues thought he might commit suicide, after seeing him repeatedly pointing a pistol at himself.

So a gathering of twenty men, the Politburo and selected military commanders, convened on 15–17 January 1935 in the city of Zunyi in north Guizhou. Much of the meeting was taken up with rehashing the question of responsibility for the collapse of the Red state. Mao’s trio blamed everything on the key pre — Long March leaders, especially Po and Braun.

It is commonly claimed that Mao became the leader of the Party and the army at the Zunyi meeting — and by majority mandate. In fact, Mao was not made chief of either the Party or the army at Zunyi. Po Ku remained Party No. 1, endorsed by the majority; the consensus was that losing Ruijin could not be blamed on him. Braun, as the only foreigner, provided a convenient scapegoat and was removed from military command. But although Mao’s two co-conspirators proposed that Mao take over, no one else seems to have supported this, and Chou En-lai was reconfirmed as military boss, with “responsibility for final decision-making in military matters.”

However, Mao did achieve one critical breakthrough at Zunyi: he became a member of the Secretariat, the decision-making core. The previous make-up of this group had been established by Moscow in January 1934. It had seven members, of whom four were on the March: Po Ku, Chou En-lai, Lo Fu, and a man called Chen Yun. The other three were Xiang Ying, Wang Ming, the CCP’s representative in Moscow, and Chang Kuo-tao, leader of what was then the second-largest Red base. At Zunyi, the Red Prof proposed that Mao be brought into the Secretariat. Actually, the Red Prof had no right to make this nomination, as he was not a full Politburo member. But Po Ku was too guilt-ridden and demoralized to oppose Mao’s promotion, and it went through. Moscow was not consulted, as radio contact had been severed.

Once inside the Secretariat, Mao was in a position to manipulate it. Of the four other members on the March, Lo Fu was already an ally, and Chen Yun took no interest in power, and was often physically absent, coping with logistics. That left Chou and Po. Mao’s strategy towards Chou was to split him off from Po with a combination of carrots and sticks, of which the foremost was blackmail, by threatening to make him co-responsible for past failures. At Zunyi it was decided that a resolution should be produced about how the Red state had been lost, and Mao’s co-conspirator Lo Fu contrived to get himself the job of drafting it, which would normally be done by the Party No. 1.

This document would be the verdict. It would be conveyed to the Party, and reported to Moscow. Lo Fu first produced a draft with the subtitle “Review of military policy errors of Comrades Po Ku, Chou En-lai and Otto Braun” and naming Chou as a co-culprit in the loss of the Red state. After Chou agreed to cooperate, his name was dropped and the blame deleted.

As Braun drily put it, Chou “subtly distanced himself from Po Ku and me, thus providing Mao with the desired pretext to focus his attack on us while sparing him.” That left Po as the only problem, and Mao could always put him in the minority. Indeed, as soon as the Zunyi meeting was over and most of the participants had rejoined their units, Mao secured from this new core group the unheard-of and decidedly odd-sounding title of “helper to comrade En-lai in conducting military affairs.” Mao had shoved a foot back inside the door of the military leadership.

This new core then elevated the Red Prof to full Politburo membership, and before long awarded him a high military post, even though he knew nothing about military matters. Most importantly, three weeks after Zunyi, on 5 February, in a village where three provinces met called “A Cock Crows Over Three Provinces,” Lo Fu was catapulted into the No. 1 Party post in place of Po Ku. Mao and Lo Fu first got Chou to capitulate and then confronted Po Ku with a “majority” in the core. Po agreed to surrender his post “only as the result of numerous discussions and pressure,” as he described it.

Lo Fu’s rise to Party No. 1 was an underhand coup, and so it was kept secret from both Party members and the army for weeks. The change at the apex was only revealed when a military victory put the plotters in a stronger position. Po was now excluded from decision-making, and as Lo Fu was a rather feeble character, Mao called the shots.

THE ZUNYI MEETING decided to move into Sichuan. Sichuan lay just north of Zunyi, and was the obvious place to head for, being large, rich and populous — and long since recommended by the Russians to the force from Ruijin. It was much closer to Soviet-controlled Mongolia, and to Xinjiang (which had by now become a virtual Soviet colony, garrisoned by Russian forces), two places to which Moscow had been preparing to ship arms for the CCP. The former chief Soviet military adviser in China, Stern, had been investigating ways to link Sichuan with locations where the Russians could even supply “aeroplanes and artillery … and enough weapons to arm 50,000 people.”

But Mao did not want to go to Sichuan. To do so would mean joining up with Chang Kuo-tao, a veteran who headed a much stronger force numbering 80,000-plus. Once they linked up with this powerful army, there would be no hope of Lo Fu becoming Party leader — or of Mao becoming the power behind the throne.

Chang Kuo-tao had chaired the Party’s 1st Congress in 1921, when Mao was a marginal participant and Lo Fu not even a Party member (Lo joined in 1925). He was a bona fide member of the Secretariat — unlike Mao, who had just squeezed his way in against the rules. In addition, Kuo-tao was a full member of the Comintern Executive Committee, which gave him considerable prestige, and he had influence in Russia, where he had lived for years, and met Stalin. After he returned from Moscow to China in January 1931, he was sent by Shanghai to head a Red enclave called Eyuwan, on the borders of the provinces of Hubei, Henan and Anhui in east-central China. There he built up a base comparable to Ruijin, which by summer 1932 had an area of over 40,000 sq km and a population of 3.5 million, with an army of 45,000 men. After he was driven out that autumn by Chiang Kai-shek, he moved to northern Sichuan, where he built a new and bigger base within a year, and expanded his army to over 80,000. Kuo-tao was undoubtedly the most successful of all the Communists. Once he joined the rest of the leadership, it seemed inevitable that he would be elected the new boss.

Nor could Mao expect to turn him into a puppet. Kuo-tao had no compunction about killing for power. In his bases he had carried out bloody purges of the original local commanders, who had opposed him. Like Mao, he personally chaired interrogations involving torture. His victims were usually bayoneted or strangled to death; some were buried alive. As his military commander Xu put it, he would readily “get rid of people who stood in his way, to establish his personal rule.”

With this daunting figure to contend with, Mao’s prospects of coming out on top would be dim. Moreover, if he waged a power struggle against Kuo-tao, he might well be risking his own life. So far, Mao had been dealing with Party leaders whose devotion to the Party meant they would kill on its behalf but not for personal power. He had been perfectly safe with Po Ku or Chou En-lai even if he made trouble for them. He could not count on that much forbearance from Kuo-tao, so his overriding goal was to delay any move into Sichuan until he had an unbreakable grip on the Party leadership.

But Mao could not spell out this goal. He had to go along with the plan to head for Sichuan. On 19 January 1935 the force with him set off from Zunyi, and on the 22nd they cabled Chang Kuo-tao, who was in north Sichuan, announcing they were coming and telling him to move south to link up with them. But Mao had a trick up his sleeve. Four days later he insisted that the Red Army should ambush an enemy force that was tailing their group. This force was from Sichuan, and had a tough reputation. Mao’s unspoken private calculation was that the Red Army might well suffer a defeat, in which case he could argue that the Sichuan enemy was too fierce, and then demand to stay in Guizhou.

The idea of the ambush was absurd, as the enemy unit Mao picked to attack was not barring the way into Sichuan, but was behind the Reds, and was not even harassing them. In fact the original plan which had designated Sichuan as their destination had specifically ordered: “keep well away from” pursuers, and “not to tangle” with them. But Mao managed to win consent from Chou En-lai, who had the final say in military decisions, most probably by threatening Chou that if he failed to go along he would be named as co-responsible for losing the Red state in the “resolution” Lo Fu was writing. It seems Chou had a mortal fear of disgrace — a weakness that Mao was to exploit repeatedly in the decades to come.

ON 28 JANUARY, Mao ordered his ambush set up to the east of a place called Tucheng, with a devastating outcome for the Reds. The enemy lived up to its fearsome reputation, and quickly seized the advantage, shattering the force that Mao had stationed with their backs against the turbulent Red River where it rushed between steep cliffs. Mao stood on a peak in the distance watching his troops being decimated, and only at the end of a whole day’s bloody battle did he permit a withdrawal. It was raining hard and the retreating troops panicked, jostling to get ahead on the slippery mountain paths. The women and wounded were pushed to the back. The enemy was so close behind that one pursuer grabbed Mrs. Zhu De’s backpack with one hand, while pulling at her gun with the other. She let go her backpack and ran. It was the only battle on the March when people in the HQ had had such a close brush with the enemy.

Four thousand Red Army men were killed or wounded—10 percent of the total. Tucheng was the biggest defeat on the Long March, and was remembered as such in private, while being completely suppressed in public — because Mao was responsible, having picked both the ground and the moment. In one day he brought about far greater casualties than had been incurred in the previous biggest loss, at the Xiang River (just over 3,000). The myth is that Mao saved the Red Army after Zunyi. The truth is the exact reverse.

The Communists crossed the Red River to the west in disarray over hastily constructed pontoons, abandoning heavy artillery and equipment like the X-ray machine. Zhu De personally covered the retreat, Mauser in hand. Normally calm, this day he lost his temper and yelled at his officers in frustration. The exhausted men had to carry or pull their wounded comrades along winding paths above vertiginous cliffs. Heavy snowfalls blanketed the dense forests and the valleys. The bitter cold, hunger, exhaustion, and the cries of pain from the wounded haunted many survivors for decades to come.

THIS TRAGIC SCENE was exactly what Mao wanted in order to argue that the Sichuan army was too grim to tangle with, and that therefore the Reds should not make for Sichuan as the original plan had laid down. But they were already inside the southeast corner of Sichuan, and many felt they had to push on northward.

The main military commanders, even Mao’s old crony Lin Biao, supported pressing deeper into Sichuan. Furthermore, they all felt very unhappy about having let Mao dictate the Tucheng ambush. When Mao turned up at Lin Biao’s to justify himself (and lay the blame on others), Braun noticed that Lin looked “decidedly sour.” But Mao prevailed, with the backing of Lo Fu. Lo shared an interest with Mao in avoiding — or postponing — joining up with Chang Kuo-tao, as his own newly acquired position as Party No. 1 would be seriously endangered if they linked up with Kuo-tao this soon. On 7 February 1935 the new Lo Fu leadership announced that the original plan — to go into Sichuan — was scrapped, in favor of Mao’s proposal to stay put in Guizhou.

The Communists turned around and crossed the Red River again. The thousands of wounded were dumped in the wintry wilderness, with little food and medicine. Within a few months most were dead.

Mao’s force reoccupied Zunyi on 27 February. Chiang wanted to harry the Reds into Sichuan, so he sent a feisty general with two divisions to retake the city, which he also bombed. The Reds managed to fend these troops off. Mao was hugely delighted, especially as these were crack troops, and this meant he might be able to stay — at least for time enough to enable him and his puppet Lo Fu to consolidate their power. He penned a poem to voice his satisfaction:

Idle claim that the strong pass is a wall of iron,

Today I crest the summit with one stride.

Crest the summit,

The rolling mountains sea-blue,

The dying sun blood-red.

It was only now that Mao and Lo Fu informed the army, including Chang Kuo-tao, that Lo Fu was the new No. 1, and that Mao had joined the Secretariat. There was nothing Kuo-tao could do. Mao and Lo Fu had deliberately waited until they had a “victory” under their belts before disclosing the changes. Once these were announced, and there was no open protest, Lo Fu appointed Mao as “General Front Commander,” a new post created specially for him, and his first formal military position for two and a half years.

The “win” was in fact a Pyrrhic victory. Peng De-huai recorded “great losses” in his corps. “Only one regiment can maintain … 50 to 60 men per company … Now all the regiment headquarters and the corps HQ were empty as if they had been cleaned out by floods.” Another “deeply worried” senior officer counseled: “We have not many troops left; we should avoid having tough battles … the Red Army can no longer stand such cost.”

Mao, however, was bent on taking on more of Chiang’s forces. They now controlled Guizhou, and he needed to tackle them if he was to stand a chance of establishing a base in the province — essential for his plan to stay out of Sichuan. On 5 March he issued an order to “eliminate two Central Government divisions.” This touched off a barrage of protest from the field commanders who had been infuriated by the way Mao had been squandering their troops. Lin Biao cabled “most urgently” on the 10th against taking on these hard-bitten enemies.

At dawn that day Lo Fu called some twenty people to a council of war, with the field commanders present. Mao found himself completely isolated on the issue of attacking Chiang’s crack forces. Even his ally Lo Fu disagreed. When Mao misplayed his hand and threatened to resign as Front Commander, the majority jumped at the offer. Peng De-huai was appointed in his place, and the council voted to steer clear of Chiang’s forces.

This time it seemed that Mao was really out. But he lost no time in plotting to reverse the decisions. That night, kerosene lamp in hand, he walked over to see Chou En-lai, who theoretically still had the final say in military matters, and talked him into holding another meeting in the morning — crucially, without the field commanders, who had returned to their units.

Mao offered Chou an inducement. With the creation of the post of General Front Commander, Chou had become somewhat redundant. Mao now suggested scrapping the post of Front Commander and setting up a new body to be called the Triumvirate, consisting of Chou, himself and the Red Prof.

With the field commanders absent, Mao was able to manipulate the second meeting. The decisions to appoint Peng in Mao’s place and to avoid Chiang’s forces were both annulled. A clear ruling by a quorum was thus overturned by a rump, with the crucial complicity of Chou. Moreover, as a result of these underhand changes, from 11 March 1935 on, the top army command did not contain a single genuine officer.

The new Triumvirate immediately ordered an attack on Chiang’s forces near Maotai, the home of the most famous Chinese liquor, where the enemy was well dug in. “Disengage fast,” Peng pleaded. “Enemy fortifications are solid, and geography is bad for us. There is no possibility of breaking [this Chiang unit].” But the Triumvirs insisted: “Throw in all our forces tomorrow … absolutely no wavering.”

When the Reds launched a frontal offensive, Chiang’s army was ready with heavy machine-guns, and routed the attackers, who suffered well over a thousand casualties. The routed Communists crossed the Red River once again and were forced into Sichuan.

Having got them where he wanted, Chiang blocked their way back into Guizhou. But Mao still spurned the obvious best option — to go on north — and ordered the Red Army to turn around and cross the river again and force its way back into Guizhou. This was so unreasonable and so unpopular that an unusual order was issued, for the eyes of the top commanders only, specially enjoining: “This crossing to the east must not be announced and must be kept secret.”

For two months, the Red Army had been “circling in an ever-contracting area, so that it passed through some districts two or three times,” in “exhausting and fruitless wandering,” a perplexed Braun observed, taking the whole thing to be “erratic.” It had fought seemingly gratuitous battles, at horrendous cost. Moreover, Mao had not just brought disasters on the army under him, he was also placing Chang Kuo-tao’s army in jeopardy, by obliging it to hang around and wait for him. Mao later shamelessly called this fiasco his “tour de force.” The fact that these huge losses were due to his jockeying for personal power remains unknown to this day.

CHIANG KAI-SHEK, TOO, was baffled to see the enemy “wandering in circles in this utterly futile place.” Unaware of Mao’s private agenda, Chiang had expected the Reds to go to Sichuan. Assuming that his own army would be following them in, on 2 March he had flown to Chongqing, the largest city in the province, to enforce central government rule. Chiang tried to terminate the quasi-independent fiefs, but the warlords put up dogged, though non-martial, resistance. He found himself powerless to subdue them, as his army was not on hand.

Chiang now redoubled his efforts to drive the Reds into Sichuan, subjecting them to heavy aerial bombardment, making it impossible for Mao to establish a foothold in Guizhou. At the same time Chiang very publicly transferred army units away from the Sichuan border as a way of signaling: There are no troops on that border. Go to Sichuan! But Mao determinedly led the exhausted Red Army in the opposite direction, southward.

Under non-stop aerial attack, “forced marches of 40 to 50 km were the rule,” Braun wrote.

The troops were showing increasing symptoms of fatigue … When planes buzzed over us, we simply threw ourselves down on the side of the road without looking for cover as we used to do. If bombs began falling in a village or farm where we slept, I no longer woke up. If one landed close to me, I just turned over …

The number of deaths, more from disease and exhaustion than battle wounds, increased daily. Although several thousand volunteers had been enlisted since the beginning of the year,^† the ranks had visibly dwindled.

During this headlong rush, the Reds had to abandon more of their medical equipment and disband the medical corps. Henceforth the wounded got virtually no treatment. As well as bullet and shrapnel wounds, many suffered severe and agonizingly painful foot infections.

The folly of Mao’s maneuvers is brought into focus by the experience of one unit, the 9th Corps, that got cut off at the River Wu, leaving its 2,000 men stranded north of the river. As a result, they were forced to move on into Sichuan. And, lo and behold, except for one or two skirmishes, they were totally unmolested. Unlike Mao’s contingent, who had to go through weeks of depleting forced marches and bombing, these men strolled in broad daylight on main roads, and could even take days off to rest.

ONE VICTIM OF Mao’s scheming was his wife. She had been traveling with the privileged wounded and sick in a special unit called the Cadres’ Convalescent Company, which included thirty women, mainly top leaders’ wives. After the battle at Tucheng, the Red Army had marched all day, about 30 km, in a downpour. At a place called White Sand, Gui-yuan left the litter which had been allocated to her two months before when she was too heavily pregnant to get on a horse, and lay down in a thatched hut. Several hours later she gave birth to a baby girl, her fourth child with Mao, on 15 February 1935. She was shown the baby, wrapped in a jacket, by her sister-in-law, Tse-min’s wife. The army spent only one day in White Sand. As she had done twice before, Gui-yuan had to leave her baby behind. She wept when the litter carried her away and Mrs. Tse-min took the baby, with a handful of silver dollars and some opium, which was used as currency, to find a family to take it in. Mrs. Tse-min had asked Gui-yuan to give the girl a name. Gui-yuan shook her head: she did not think she would ever see the girl again. Her instinct was right. The old lady to whom the baby was entrusted had no milk. Three months later, boils erupted all over the baby’s body, and it died.

In later life, when Gui-yuan spent a great deal of time looking for the babies she had been forced to abandon, she never seriously tried to look for this daughter. She would say to people close to her: “The girl born on the Long March, I didn’t even get a good look at her. I wasn’t even clear where exactly she was born, and who we gave her to …” But the child stayed on her mind. In 1984, the year of Gui-yuan’s death, her former chief on the March visited her in hospital. He told us that while they were talking about something else, she suddenly asked him, out of the blue: “Where, but where was it that I had that baby, do you remember?”

Mao did not come to see Gui-yuan, although they were in the same town. It was not till later, when their paths happened to cross, that she told him she had left the baby behind. Mao said blandly: “You were right. We had to do this.”

Deep down, Gui-yuan was wounded by Mao’s indifference. She would tell friends that the remark of his that pained her most was when he would say to other women with a grin: “Why are you women so afraid of giving birth? Look at [Gui-yuan], giving birth for her is as easy as a hen dropping an egg.” Two months after giving birth, while Mao led the Red Army on the hellish march southward away from Sichuan, Gui-yuan was hit by a bomb and nearly died. Early one evening in mid-April, three planes appeared between terraced rice paddies on mountain slopes, flying so low that people on the ground could make out the pilots’ faces. Machine-guns rattled, and bombs dropped along the path where Gui-yuan and her comrades were catching their breath. Limbs flew into trees, and blood and brains puddled the ground in crimson.

More than a dozen shrapnel splinters sliced into Gui-yuan’s skull and back, one ripping the right side of her back wide open. She was soaked in blood. A doctor picked out shrapnel splinters with tweezers and applied the wound-salve baiyao to stem the bleeding. Gui-yuan lay unconscious, with blood pouring out of her nose and mouth. The doctor who gave her an injection of cardiotonic thought that she might have two hours to live. Her company leaders decided to leave her behind with a local family. Mao, who was in the next village, was informed about her condition. He did not come to see her — he was “tired.” He just said he did not want her left behind, and sent over a doctor and two of his own litter-bearers. Mao did not come to see her until the third day. By then she had recovered consciousness, but was still unable to speak, or even cry. Continuing the journey was agony; Gui-yuan kept on fainting, only to be woken up by stabs of excruciating pain. She begged her comrades to shoot her.

AFTER TWO MONTHS of rushing farther and farther south with no end in view, everybody was asking: “Where are we going?” Among the top echelon who knew about the plan to link up with the Red Army branch in Sichuan, and the long-term strategy of getting closer to Russia, a deep resentment grew towards Mao. Lin Biao clamored: “This way, the troops will be dragged to ruination! We absolutely cannot have him in command like this!” Lin wrote to the Triumvirate in April, calling on Mao to hand over command to Peng De-huai, and for the whole force to go straight to Sichuan. Everyone was furious with Mao, even Lo Fu, who had at first acquiesced in his scheme. The sacrifices were just too horrendous. Braun recalled: “One day Lo Fu, with whom I normally had little contact … began talking of what he termed the catastrophic military predicament engendered by Mao’s reckless strategy and tactics ever since Tsunyi [Zunyi].” Lo argued that if they were to avoid annihilation, the Triumvirate “had to be replaced by competent military leaders.”

Mao was livid about the change in Lo Fu. Braun noticed that when Mao once struck up a conversation with him, “the name of Lo Fu brought a sharper tone to his voice. Lo Fu, he said, had panicked and was intriguing against him.” But Lo was no real threat, as he had laid himself open to blackmail by Mao from the moment he agreed to delay meeting up with Chang Kuo-tao to preserve his own position as Party No. 1. Mao also appealed to Lo’s personal feelings: knowing that Lo was in love with a young woman, Mao arranged to have her transferred so that she could be with him.

In mid-April 1935, the Reds, still being pursued, entered Yunnan province, in the southwest corner of China. Mao ordered them to stay put and even to “expand southwards”—i.e., even farther away from the direction of Sichuan. But southward lay Vietnam, which was occupied by the French, who were extremely hostile to the Reds. Besides, this corner of China was mainly inhabited by an ethnic group called the Miao, who had given the Reds some very hard times at the beginning of the March, and were extremely warlike. Everyone could see that this was a dead end.

The field commanders were enraged by Mao’s order. The night they received it, 25 April, Lin Biao cabled to demand that they “go immediately … into Sichuan … and be ready to join up” with Chang Kuo-tao. Peng concurred.

Mao could not drag his feet any longer. On 28 April he finally consented to head for Sichuan. Once the Red Army started northward, their path was trouble-free. Even facilitated. That day they found a truck carrying twenty very detailed maps (scale 1:100,000), as well as a load of local goodies — tea, ham and the famed baiyao—parked by the roadside waiting to be captured. Chiang or the Yunnan authorities had clearly organized this bounty to hasten the Reds out of Yunnan into Sichuan. When the Reds got near the provincial border, the Golden Sand River (the name of the Yangtze in these upper reaches), three crossing towns opened their gates, offering zero resistance, even handing over money and food.

It took the Reds seven days and nights to cross the Golden Sand River at the beginning of May. Chiang’s troops stood close, but did not interfere. None of the ferry points was defended. Spotter planes wheeled overhead, but this time dropped no bombs. Long Marchers remembered “a frightening number” of flies being more of a nuisance.

But once across the river, Mao tried to avoid going farther north. He ordered a siege to be laid to a town just inside Sichuan called Huili, so it could be the center of a new base. Surrounded by a moat, and with thick walls and battlements dating from the fifteenth century, Huili was held by a local warlord, whose home it was, and who was prepared to go to any lengths to keep it. He burned down all the houses outside the city walls so as to leave no shelter for the besiegers, and killed scores of his own soldiers suspected of harboring Red sympathies. Chiang’s planes now began bombing again, to drive the Reds on. Casualties were very high, and the Red Army, with no medicine, was unable to take care of them. Mao was indifferent, and never once visited the wounded.

For Peng De-huai, the level of casualties and failure to treat the wounded were the last straw. He decided to challenge Mao for the military leadership. Peng had wide support from other field commanders, not least Lin Biao, who pointed out that Mao had dragged the Red Army on a huge detour, and that they could have gone straight into Sichuan well over three months before. Lo Fu convened a meeting on 12 May, in a makeshift thatched shed.

With his back to the wall, Mao fought with fearsome willpower and enormous rage, condemning Peng with political labels like “right-wing,” and accusing him of stirring up Lin Biao. When Lin tried to reason, Mao just bellowed: “You are a baby! You don’t know a thing!” Lin could not compete with Mao in a shouting match, and was bludgeoned into silence. Peng was doomed by his own decency and decorum. Unlike Mao, he was shy about fighting for power for himself, even though his cause was good. Nor could he match Mao in mud-slinging and “political” smearing.

Mao got support from the deeply compromised Party No. 1, Lo Fu, who stigmatized Peng and Peng’s supporters as “right-wing opportunists.” In doing so, he acted against his own feelings, under the shadow of blackmail by Mao. Others were silent. Taking on Mao was no small thing. Apart from the terrifying atmosphere he created on the spot, and the sense of urgency and demoralization created by being on the run for some eight months, a sustained fight could well have led to the Party and the army being split. So Mao kept his job. His hatred for Peng because of Huili lasted for the rest of Peng’s life, and he started to take revenge immediately. After the meeting, a close friend of Peng’s, who had also brought up the tremendous casualties in the battles initiated by Mao, and had opposed marking time in Guizhou, found himself denounced. He understood that Peng was the implicit target: “it was inconvenient to denounce Peng De-huai by name, so I was denounced instead.”

Mao was astute enough to agree to a trade-off. He withdrew the order to take Huili, and agreed, finally and explicitly, to “go north at once to join up with” Chang Kuo-tao. He had been putting this off for four months, and in doing so had lost some 30,000 men, more than half of the force with him. Because of him, the soldiers under him had walked at least an extra 2,000 km, often on lacerated feet.

But Mao had made tremendous headway towards achieving his goal. Not only did he now have a formal top military job, but his puppet Lo Fu had established himself as the de facto Party No. 1. These four months of ruthless sacrificial procrastination had made a critical difference. Mao had not entirely averted a power struggle with Chang Kuo-tao, but he had vastly improved his chances.

Mao at once began making preparations, and his most important step was to dispatch a reliable envoy to Moscow to establish his status. (Someone had to go in person as there was no radio communication.) The man he chose had no political ambitions of his own, was obliging, and senior enough to deal with any problems that might come up in Moscow. This was Chen Yun, a member of the Secretariat. Mao chose his spokesman well. In Moscow, Chen delivered a carefully crafted message which gave the impression that the majority of the high command had elected Mao as their leader at a proper meeting: “an enlarged Politburo meeting … removed the [old] leadership and put comrade Mao Tse-tung in the leadership.”

MAO’S GROUP HAD now reached west-central Sichuan, near Tibet, marching straight north towards Chang Kuo-tao. This next stretch provided the backdrop for the primal myth about the Long March — the crossing of the bridge over the Dadu River. This river constituted a formidable natural barrier. In late May, swollen with the Himalayan snows, it was a raging torrent, trapped between towering cliffs. Its rock-strewn bed concealed treacherous whirlpools that made wading or swimming across impossible.

There was no way around, and only one bridge, which had been built in the early eighteenth century as part of the imperial road connecting Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. It was a magnificent suspension bridge, 101 meters long and over 3 meters wide, carried by 13 thick iron chains, 9 on the bottom, with gaps a foot wide between each chain. Wooden planks paved the surface, and covered the gaps.

This bridge is the center of the Long March myth, fed to the journalist Edgar Snow in 1936. Crossing the bridge, Snow wrote, “was the most critical single incident of the Long March.” As he describes it:

half this wooden flooring had been removed [by the Nationalists], and before them [the marchers] only the bare iron chains swung to a point midway in the stream. At the northern bridgehead an enemy machine-gun nest faced them, and behind it were positions held by a regiment of White troops … [W]ho would have thought the Reds would insanely try to cross on the chains alone? But that was what they did.

He described men being shot and falling into the river.

Paraffin was thrown on the [remaining] planking, and it began to burn. By then about twenty Reds were moving forward on their hands and knees, tossing grenade after grenade into the enemy machine-gun nest.

This is complete invention. There was no battle at the Dadu Bridge. Most probably the legend was constructed because of the site itself: the chain bridge over the roiling river looked a good place for heroic deeds. There were no Nationalist troops at the bridge when the Reds arrived on 29 May. The Communists claim that the bridge was defended by a Nationalist regiment under one Li Quan-shan, but cables to and from this regiment locate it a long way away, at a place called Hualinping. There had been a different Nationalist unit headquartered in Luding, the town at one end of the bridge, but this unit had been moved out of town just before the Reds arrived. The numerous Nationalist communications make no mention of any fighting on the bridge or in the town, while they do mention skirmishes en route to the bridge, and after the Communists crossed over it. Chiang had left the passage open for the Reds.

When the Red advance unit reached the area, it set up HQ in a Catholic church near the bridge, and shelled and fired across the river at Luding on the opposite side. A local woman, who was a sprightly 93-year-old when we met her in 1997, described to us what happened. In 1935 her family — all Catholics, like most locals in those days — was running a bean-curd shop right by the bridge on the side held by the Reds, and Red soldiers were billeted in her house. She remembered the Communists firing as “Only Yin a shell, and Yang a shot”—a Chinese expression for sporadic. She did not remember her side of the river being fired on at all.

Some planks of the bridge may have been removed or damaged. The 93-year-old remembered that the Reds borrowed her doors and those of her neighbors to put on the bridge, and after the troops had crossed over, the locals went to collect their doors. But the bridge was not reduced to its bare chains: the only time this happened was when Mao’s regime made a propaganda film. Nor was the bridge set on fire. This claim was explicitly denied by the curator of the museum at the bridge in 1983.

The strongest evidence that there was no battle is that the Red Army crossed the bridge without incurring a single casualty. The vanguard consisted of twenty-two men, who, according to the myth, stormed the bridge in a suicide attack. But at a celebration immediately afterward, on June 2, all twenty-two were not only alive and well, they each received a Lenin suit, a fountain pen, a bowl and a pair of chopsticks. Not one was even wounded.

No one else died under fire. Chou En-lai’s bodyguard described how Chou, having been upset when he heard that a horse had fallen into the river, went to check on human losses. “No men lost?” Chou asked the commander of the unit that had taken the bridge, Yang Cheng-wu, to which Yang replied: “None.”

In 1982, no less an authority than China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiao-ping, himself a Dadu Bridge participant, confirmed that there was no battle. When a U.S. interlocutor described the crossing as “a great feat of arms,” Deng smiled and said, “Well, that’s the way it’s presented in our propaganda.… In fact, it was a very easy military operation. There wasn’t really much to it. The other side were just some troops of the warlord who were armed with old muskets and it really wasn’t that much of a feat, but we felt we had to dramatize it.” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security adviser, speech at Standford 2005, p. 3)

MAO WALKED ACROSS the Dadu bridge on 31 May 1935. He was now only about 300 km away from the dreaded meeting with Chang Kuo-tao. Between him and Kuo-tao’s advance unit coming to meet him was a mountain called the Big Snowy, in a largely Tibetan area. In spite of its name — and myth — there was no snow where they climbed, locals told us. But it was cold, with sleet and biting winds, made worse by the fact that many men had abandoned their warm clothes in the semi-tropical lowlands, in an effort to shed some weight. All they had to provide some warmth was boiling chili water which they drank before they set off. Although it took only one day to cross, the mountain claimed many lives, partly because of the altitude (the pass was 10,000 feet high) but mainly because the marchers had been weakened by their privations.

They had been walking virtually non-stop for nearly eight months, half the time totally pointlessly from a military or survival point of view — though not from the point of view of Mao’s ascent to power. In addition to being attacked by their enemies, they had been assailed by innumerable ailments. “All of us were unbelievably lice-ridden,” Braun remembered. “Bleeding dysentery was rampant; the first cases of typhus appeared … More and more, our route was lined with the bodies of the slain, frozen or simply exhausted.” It was hardest for those who had to carry the leaders in their litters and heavy loads. Some porters never got up again after they sat down to rest.

Mao climbed the mountain on foot, using a walking-stick. He fared far better than his young bodyguards, as he was much better nourished and rested.

Kuo-tao’s men were waiting for them on the far side, in a Tibetan town of about 100 households, with a cornucopia of supplies — not only food, but clothes, shoes, woolen socks, blankets, gloves and delicacies like preserved yellow peas, tea and salt. This army was well fed and well kitted-out, and even had supplies to spare. Mao and the other leaders got extra food, horses or donkeys, and woolen suits. A docile horse was chosen for Mao, who was also given a male doctor to serve as his nurse.

A week later, on 25 June, Kuo-tao, having ridden over three days through virgin forests and rocky gorges, arrived to meet Mao and his companions at a village called Fubian. The two biggest Red armies were now formally linked up.

DAYS LATER, on 4 July, Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law, H. H. Kung (vice-premier and finance minister), called on Soviet ambassador Dmitri Bogomolov, ostensibly to discuss Japan’s moves in northern China. At the very end, Kung remarked that the Generalissimo very much wanted to see his son. This was Chiang saying to Stalin: I have allowed two major Red armies to survive and join forces, would you please let me have my son? “We are not putting any obstacles in the way of him leaving,” Bogomolov replied, lying smoothly, “but as far as I know, he does not want to go anywhere.”

Although he did not get his son back now, Chiang had achieved his goal of bringing the three southwestern provinces under the central government. The Guizhou warlord had been forced to resign, and left the province after being lavishly bought off. The Yunnan governor stayed on and maintained a good relationship with Chiang (for the time being). With his own army now in Sichuan, following at Mao’s heels, Chiang returned there in May to assume control of this strategically important — and most populous — province. Here he spent months of intensive activity to build up Sichuan as his base for war against Japan.

Mao too had succeeded in his goal. The 2,000-kilometer detour he had forced upon the Red Army had bought the time to establish his puppet Lo Fu as de facto Party chief, and Mao had secured his grip on the Party leadership as the man behind the throne. Chang Kuo-tao’s chances had been critically reduced. Mao’s machinations had reduced the ranks under him by tens of thousands, to around 10,000 hungry and exhausted men in rags. But no matter to him. The army could be rebuilt.

As always, Mao regarded the Kremlin as his only hope if he was to conquer China. Now that he was nearer than ever to Russian-controlled territory, he began to talk about requesting “matériel and technical assistance” from Soviet Central Asia. His paramount aim now was to ensure that Chang Kuo-tao, who outgunned him by about 8 to 1, did not gain access to Soviet arms — or the Kremlin’s ear — before he did.

Lack of majority support for Mao is also clear from the fact that when he later referred to those who had supported him at Zunyi, he never produced more than two names — those of his two co-conspirators.

Soviet military attaché Lepin secretly advised on the best supply routes. The former CCP leader Li Li-san was sent from Moscow to a secret GRU base on the Chinese border, to try to establish radio contact. The US vice-consul in Yunnan, Arthur Ringwalt, spotted the danger, and warned Washington in early January 1935: “The situation appears to be increasingly serious for China. Unless a miracle happens, the Communists will force an entry into Szechwan [Sichuan] by one route or another. [Then] it will be only a matter of time before the well-known plan … to establish communications with Soviet Russia will have been carried out. Then it will be useless to talk further about communist suppression.”

Another person who made the point was, surprisingly, a very important British spy for Russia, Kim Philby. In an article about Tibet published in Nazi Germany in 1936, Philby emphasized the strategic significance of the Chinese Reds linking up with the Russians in the northwest.

Chang Kuo-tao was so successful mainly because the part of Sichuan he entered was in the grip of some exceptionally heartless warlords who squeezed the population so hard that even in towns there were many people who could not afford clothing, and were walking round completely naked. There had been several peasant uprisings just before Kuo-tao’s army arrived, and his forces had been able to enlist recruits en masse. He also had a military chief, Xu Xiang-qian, who was arguably the most talented of the Chinese Communist commanders.

Normal procedure on the March was to leave the wounded with local families, with some money. The fate of those left behind was a matter of luck. Chang Kuo-tao’s branch left behind some women soldiers who were too ill and weak to go on. When Party historians went looking for them half a century later, they found they had endured atrocious experiences. The locals, whose families had suffered at the hands of the Reds, took it out on them, and tortured some of the women to death by driving wooden stakes into their vaginas and cutting off their breasts. To survive, some women married more affluent peasants. But when their own Party came to power they were designated as “landlords,” and denounced, humiliated and discriminated against for life. In 1985, in bitter November cold, the few seen by Party historians, by then in their sixties and seventies, were so poor that they did not wear shoes to the encounter, as these were considered too valuable to endanger for such a non-essential occasion.

Chiang and his officers were so mystified that they thought Mao wanted to attack the capital of Guizhou, where Chiang was, to try to get Chiang himself. But the Reds sped past without stopping.

^†In Guizhou, where the population was dirt-poor, the Reds had recruited many thousands of young men.

Giving birth on the March was a nightmare. One woman who had gone into labor had to walk to the night’s destination with the baby’s head dangling out. Next day before dawn, weeping at leaving her baby in a bundle of straw in the empty hut, she had to walk on, and fainted wading through an icy river. Her women comrades found a table to carry her on. The wife of Teng Fa, the then head of the Chinese KGB, had a most painful delivery. Writhing in agony, she cursed her husband for making her pregnant. Teng Fa was fetched, and stood uncomfortably in the little hut, hanging his head. Mrs. Po Ku would say half jokingly: “On the march, I prefer a donkey or a horse to an old Male!”

A picture of it features on the cover of the 1985 book The Long March, by Harrison Salisbury, which purveys the official post-Mao version.

Nationalist plans on the 28th described the task of the unit, under Yu Song-lin, as “to defend Kangding,” a city about 50 km away as the crow flies. The fact that Yu’s troops were not at or near the bridge is demonstrated in a report of 3 June by the governor of the region.

When Peng De-huai, the most honest of all the Communist leaders, was asked about the Dadu crossing by a British writer in 1946, he gently, but very clearly, refused to endorse the myth. “It’s a long time ago, and I cannot remember all of it. There were so many rivers — the Gold Sand river, the Hsiang river, the Wu and the Yangtse … I cannot remember very much, but I remember the people falling into the water …” He did not say one word about fighting, or a burning bridge. It seems that two or three people did die at the bridge, but only when they fell off while repairing it, when one old plank suddenly snapped, as Mrs. Zhu De and the 93-year-old local we interviewed remembered. For good measure, the Reds constructed an ancillary myth about more heroism around the other crossing of the Dadu River, at Anshunchang, some 75 km to the south. Although this ferry crossing was extremely exposed and it took the troops a whole week to cross, with spotter planes circling overhead, there was not a single battle casualty here, either.

14. LONG MARCH III: MONOPOLIZING THE MOSCOW CONNECTION (1935 AGE 41)

WHEN THE TWO Red armies joined up in June 1935, Mao’s force — known as the Central Red Army, as it came directly under the Party leadership — was in a state of ruin. It had started the Long March with 80,000 men. Now it was down to some 10,000—one-eighth its original strength. The surviving remnant was on the verge of collapse. It had lost nearly all its heavy weapons, and its rifles had an average of only five bullets each. As Zhu De lamented to Chang Kuo-tao, who was an old friend, this army “had been a giant before, but now it’s only a skeleton. It can no longer fight.”

In contrast, Kuo-tao’s army, 20,000 at the outset of their own march, had quadrupled to an impressive 80,000. They were well fed, well equipped with machine-guns and mortars and ample ammunition, and superbly trained.

It was thus from a position of considerable strength that Kuo-tao met his colleagues. He was “a tall, stately man about forty,” Otto Braun recalled, who “received us as a host would his guests. He behaved with great self-confidence, fully aware of his military superiority and administrative power … His cadres … controlled most of the area’s meager resources, which were essential for the care of tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers … He was every bit as ambitious as Mao …”

The moment had arrived when Kuo-tao had to be given a job, and he had an extremely strong case for being made head of either the Party or the army. Mao did not want him to have either. It was showdown time. Mao seemed to be at an overwhelming disadvantage, and yet he emerged from the link-up with Kuo-tao as the victor, thanks to the three political figures who had been with him and formed the core Party leadership, the Secretariat — Lo Fu, Chou En-lai and Po Ku.

As far as Lo Fu was concerned, he had no hope of holding on to his position as Party No. 1 without Mao. Moreover, when Mao had decided to drag the army off on a detour, Lo had given his consent rather than risk losing his newly won position. Chou En-lai had colluded with Mao all the way. The one who on the face of it might seem to have had the least to lose by switching sides was Po Ku, who had been elbowed out of his No. 1 position by Mao and Lo Fu. But he too was heavily compromised in the destruction of the army; he had put up no effective struggle on its behalf, and was now very much a broken man.

So, although there was now a chance to gang up with Kuo-tao and ditch Mao, the top men chose not to do so, out of personal interest. If they now blamed Mao for everything that had gone wrong, this was bound to raise the question: Where were you? This would imply that there had been a better alternative which they had failed to grasp. It would make them seem unfit to be leaders. Out of self-protection, they stuck with a simple story-line: that the Central Army had been wrecked by more powerful Nationalist forces. To bolster the image of their own resilience, they tried to denigrate Kuo-tao’s army, which had been highly successful, in spite of the heavy fighting it had faced. As they could hardly fault its military performance, they resorted to political smear tactics, saying it suffered from “warlordism” and “political backwardness,” and had “a bandit style.”

These accusations enraged Kuo-tao’s army. The two camps descended into a mud-slinging contest, in which Kuo-tao’s men had a virtual walkover. The wretched state of the Central Red Army was plain for all to see, and the scorn poured on it clung to the whole of the leadership.

“How can such a Centre and Mao Tse-tung lead us?” was the widely voiced sentiment. This resentment was directed against the entire Center, not just Mao, and this was a key factor in throwing the three core leaders — Lo Fu, Chou En-lai and Po Ku — together with Mao, which gave him a majority in the Secretariat of 4 to 1 against Kuo-tao.

The trio felt it was “sink or swim” with Mao as their own officers and soldiers started to vent their outrage as well. There was a flood of complaints about military “incompetence” and indifference to the welfare of the rank-and-file. “They didn’t know where they were running … so aimlessly,” officers told Kuo-tao, and “should have let the army rest and recover.” The rank-and-file, in turn, voiced bitter feelings about the way their leaders had abandoned the wounded, and turned ordinary soldiers into “sedan-chair bearers” for the VIPs and their wives.

This charge — that Mao and the other leaders had “sat in sedan chairs” all through the March — was the sorest issue of them all. A Long Marcher told us how angry the ordinary soldiers had felt: the leaders “talked about equality, but they lounged about in litters, like landlords. We talked in whispers …” The soldiers were told that “the leaders have a very hard life. Although they don’t walk, nor carry loads, their brains and everything have it much rougher than we do. We only walk and eat, we don’t have cares.” Not surprisingly, this low-level sophistry failed to assuage the rank-and-file.

Not having to walk made the difference between life and death. Not a single one of the wounded or the weak with a high enough rank to qualify for the Cadres’ Convalescent Company died on the March. Nor did any of the leaders who were carried, even those who were badly wounded. While the elite all survived, sheer exhaustion killed many of their much younger litter-carriers, nurses and bodyguards, who were often in their teens — and some as young as twelve or thirteen. One statistic reveals the stony-hearted hierarchy and privilege under Mao’s dominion: the Central Red Army now had almost more officers than soldiers.

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.

Instead of trying to conserve the strength of the Red Army, Mao insisted that Kuo-tao must face the same evil conditions — after him. Having fired off his menacing ultimatum, Mao floated into the swamps on his litter, sacrificing a huge pile of books, including the complete set of his favorite Twenty-four Histories, before departing. By the end of the first day, Long March records show that the troops had trudged “with not a single person in sight, crossed 5 rivers, 3 of which had no bridges,” and were “soaked to the skin … sitting huddled in the rain for the night.” Braun has left a vivid description of what most endured:

A deceptive green cover hid a black vicious swamp, which sucked in anyone who broke through the thin crust or strayed from the narrow path … We drove native cattle or horses before us which instinctively found the least dangerous way. Grey clouds almost always hung just over the ground. Cold rain fell several times a day, at night it turned to wet snow or sleet. There was not a dwelling, tree, or shrub as far as the eye could see. We slept in squatted positions on the small hills which rose over the moor. Thin blankets, large straw hats, oil-paper umbrellas or, in some cases, stolen capes, were our only protection. Some did not awaken in the morning, victims of cold and exhaustion. And this was the middle of August!.. Outbreaks of bloody dysentery and typhus … again won the upper hand.

Another Long Marcher remembered: “I once saw several men under a blanket and thought they were stragglers. So I tried to rouse them.” The men were dead. There was little to eat: “When a horse died, we ate it: the troops at the front ate the meat, the ones at the back gnawed the bones. When everything ran out, we ate the roots of grass, and chewed leather belts.”

Mrs. Lo Fu saw the corpses of friends all the time … On the sixth day, I got dysentery. I couldn’t worry about embarrassment and just squatted down and shat all the time. Then I would tie my trousers and rush to catch up. I spent two days like this, and gritted my teeth to get through. For seven days and nights, it was a world of no human beings. On the eighth day, when I walked out of the swamp and saw villages, people, cattle, and smoke coming out of chimneys, when I saw turnips in the fields, my happiness was beyond words … Those seven days and nights were the hardest time in the Long March. When I arrived in Banyou, I felt as if I had just returned to the human world from the world of death.

A night at Banyou, in a hut made of dried yak droppings plastered over wicker, able to dry one’s clothes by a bonfire of the all-purpose dung, was the lap of luxury for those who survived. In Lin Biao’s corps alone, 400 had died — some 15 percent of its complement.

This was the ordeal that Mao was demanding that Kuo-tao’s tens of thousands of troops should go through, instead of marching along proper roads on the route first assigned. Invoking the name of the Politburo, Mao kept piling on the pressure, urging Kuo-tao to “move fast to Banyou.” In one cable written after he had emerged from the swampland and knew full well what it was like, Mao lied through his teeth: “From Maoergai [where he had started] to Banyou, it is short in distance and plentiful in shelter.” He then advised Kuo-tao: “Suggest you … bring all the wounded and sick who can manage to walk, plus the matériel and equipment …” On the surface, this seemed to be telling Kuo-tao: Don’t abandon your wounded, but its real intention was to cause maximum suffering.

If Kuo-tao refused to obey, Mao could get him formally condemned and removed from command. Reluctantly, Kuo-tao agreed to come to Mao, and directed his huge army into the swampland. A couple of days’ taste of what lay ahead made him even less keen than before. On 2 September his force reached a river in spate. He cabled Mao: “We have reconnoitred 30 li [15 km] up and down the river, and cannot find anywhere we can ford. Difficult to find bridge-making material. Have food for only 4 days …”

A day later, he decided to go no further. “Have reconnoitred 70 li [35 km] upstream, and still cannot ford or build a bridge,” he told Mao. “There is food for only 3 days for all the units … The swampland looks boundless. Impossible to go forward, and seem to be waiting for our death. Cannot find guide. Sheer misery. Have decided to start back to Aba from tomorrow morning.” He barely hid his fury against Mao: “The whole strategy is affected. Last time … the troops ran out of food and suffered great damage. This time, you force us to move to Banyou, and get us into this …” Kuo-tao turned back.

By now, Kuo-tao and the main body of the army had been shunted around for a month, thanks to Mao. Moreover, in these highlands, murderous weather was setting in. Kuo-tao now made a decision that was just the one Mao had been angling for: to suspend the journey north and stay put until spring the next year. “The window of opportunity to go north has been lost,” he told Mao. Two-thirds of his troops had contracted foot infections and could hardly walk. If they were to embark on the long march north, nearly all the wounded and sick would have to be abandoned.

Mao, of course, knew all this; indeed, the whole point of hustling Kuo-tao’s army from pillar to post was to reduce it to this state. Mao had now achieved his key objective: he had made sure he would get to the Russians first, knocking Kuo-tao out of the running by penning him up in the south till the following year.

ONCE KUO-TAO GAVE the order not to go on north, Mao faced a major problem. Kuo-tao had issued this order as military supremo. Mao could issue orders in the name of the Party, but he was not at all sure that he could take any of the army, even his own troops, with him, if they were allowed a choice. Crisis time came on 8 September when Kuo-tao ordered his two commanders with Mao to bring the Right Column down south to him.

Aware that he lacked prestige among the troops, Mao ducked a straight confrontation. He did not dare challenge Kuo-tao’s order openly, even in the name of the Party. Instead, he kidnapped his own troops, using false pretenses. On the night of 9–10 September, he and Lo Fu told a select few an egregious lie — that Kuo-tao had ordered his men to harm the Party leaders; so, Mao said, they must secretly muster their subordinates and decamp that night. Mrs. Lo Fu remembered being woken up in the middle of the night and told: “ ‘Get up! Get up! Set off at once!’ We asked: ‘What happened?’ ‘Where are we going?’ [and were told]: ‘No questions, just get a move on and go!.. No noise, no torches … follow me!’ We rushed for about 10 li [5 km] and did not pause to catch our breath until after we crossed a mountain pass.”

At the same time as he was abducting his own troops, Mao got one of his top men to extract the 2nd Bureau, which handled radio communications, from HQ, and steal the detailed maps.

On this occasion, Mao had help from a crucial new ally — Peng De-huai. Just over three months before, Peng had challenged Mao for the military leadership, and had been friendly towards Kuo-tao, who had tried to cultivate him. But now Peng sided with Mao. The reason was not only that Mao controlled the Party leadership, but that he had also grabbed pole position for the Russian connection.

At dawn on 10 September, Kuo-tao’s commanders with the Right Column woke up to find Mao and Co. gone, as well as the maps. Moreover, they were told that the rear guard of Mao’s escape party had their guns cocked and would open fire on any pursuers. Officers stationed along the route the escapers were taking rang to ask whether they should use force to stop Mao and his band, as it was obvious that they were leaving surreptitiously. Kuo-tao’s commanders decided that “Red Army must not shoot Red Army,” so Mao was allowed to get away.

As Mao and his men went on their way, a propaganda team from Kuo-tao’s army appeared and began to wave and shout: “Don’t follow Big Nose! Please turn back!” “Big Nose” meant foreigner, in this case Otto Braun. Braun had also been told the lie that Kuo-tao had given an order “to break the resistance of the Central Committee, by force if necessary.” The shouting disclosed for the first time to the rank-and-file that there was a split in the army, and caused great confusion and anxiety. Mao’s political department immediately sent staff to urge the soldiers on, in case some took the opportunity to go with Kuo-tao.

At this point, Mao had fewer than 8,000 troops, and they were desperately bewildered men, who had not chosen to take his side. Most unusually for him, he now appeared in front of the troops. He did not address them, but just stood in silence by the roadside, watching them go by, counting their strength, trying to gauge their mood. He made sure to have Peng stand beside him, to lend authority. For most, even quite senior officers, this was the only time they got this close to Mao, who preferred to wield power in the shadows.

Mao’s next move was to make sure that Chiang Kai-shek gave his contingent no trouble. By now there could be no doubt that Chiang had been letting him through, but would allow only a weakened army to reach its destination. During the Long March, while Mao’s force had been given little trouble, Kuo-tao’s had had to fight every inch of the way — and the reason was that it was too large and too powerful.

It was thus to Mao’s advantage for Chiang to know that only a small branch was now going north, and that the CCP leadership was with it. Sure enough, within hours of Mao’s splitting, the Nationalists knew both these facts, and exactly which troops had gone with Mao, and how debilitated they were. On 11 September, the day after Mao bolted, Chiang told his governor in the area that he had “received information that Mao, Peng, Lin and their bandits are fleeing north, and they are all totally starved and worn out …”

Kuo-tao seems to have had no doubt that the information was deliberately leaked by Mao, as a cable he sent to Mao and Co. next day read: “The morning after you left, [the enemy] knew straight away that Peng De-huai’s unit had fled northward. Please beware of reactionaries … leaking secrets. No matter what differences we have, we must not reveal military movements to our enemy.”

This leak ensured Mao a smooth run for himself all the way to his destination — the Yellow Earth Plateau. There in North Shaanxi the only secure base in the whole of China awaited him, courtesy of Chiang Kai-shek. Mao and the core leaders had known about this base before the Long March, and Moscow had told them to expand it as far back as 3 May 1934, well before the March set off.

MAO ENJOYED A helping hand from Chiang, and the next thousand kilometers were virtually obstacle-free, militarily. “Except for native snipers,” Braun recorded, “this stretch was void of enemies.” Chiang’s forces shadowed them, but only to prevent Mao straying back into the heartland of China.

This final stretch was a cakewalk compared with before. Instead of snow and hail, and Tibetans sniping from the woods, here in south Gansu the Reds saw golden ears of grain in glorious sunshine, sheep at pasture and farmers tending fields. The locals were friendly, and Mao made an effort to keep them that way. He did not want another reception like the one from the Tibetans, and enjoined “strict discipline.” Muslims made up 60 percent of the population, and the Red Army was forbidden to slaughter or eat pigs, and ordered not to rob any Muslims, even the rich.

The locals allowed the Red Army into their homes, where the men had a hot bath for the first time in months, enjoyed a shave and a haircut, and ate hearty Muslim meals, with pancakes and noodles, mutton and chicken, garlic and pepper. The hospitality, Braun remembered, “astonished me greatly.”

But this friendly atmosphere became the cause of a major headache for Mao, as desertions soared. A Nationalist report showed that while Mao’s troops were in one county alone, Minxian, over 1,000 Red Army men gave themselves up. On 2 October Mao ordered the security forces to “collect” stragglers. “Collect” often meant execution. One senior officer (later army chief of staff in Communist China) recalled: “During the march to north Shaanxi, there were continual stragglers. The army political security organization … adopted cruel means of punishment again.” He was scared: “I followed the troops carefully, worried all the time that I might fall behind and be dealt with as a straggler.” “Deal with” was akin to the Mafia’s “take care of,” a euphemism for killing. One day, “on the verge of collapse,” he thought he might not make it: “my heart only settled back to its place when I got to quarters at 11 o’clock at night.”

When Mao finally arrived at the Red area in north Shaanxi that was to be his base, his army was down to well below 4,000. In the last — and easiest — month of the journey, he actually lost more than half his remaining men, between deserters, stragglers, and deaths both from illness and at the hands of his own security men. His force was just about the same size as when he had left the outlaw land back in January 1929, seven years earlier. And the troops were in the worst possible shape. One officer recalled:

We were famished and exhausted. Our clothes, in particular, were in shreds. We had no shoes or socks, and many people wrapped their feet with strips of blanket … Wuqi [where they arrived] was already a very poor place, but even the … local comrades kept questioning me: how come you got into such a sorry state? You really looked like nothing but a bunch of beggars.

But Mao was not feeling at all defeated when he set foot in the Red territory on 18 October 1935. “The darkest moment” in his life — as he described the threat from Kuo-tao — was over, and he was the winner. The Red Army might be on its last legs after a trek of some 10,000 km, lasting an entire year, of which four months were extra, thanks to him, but the Party was now, to all intents and purposes, his.

HIS ENVOY, Chen Yun, had reached Moscow, and delivered his message to the Comintern on 15 October. With Mao the clear winner on the ground, Moscow accepted, for the first time, that he was now the boss of the CCP. In November the Russians published a carefully edited version of Chen Yun’s report, proclaiming Mao by name as “the tried and tested political” leader of the Chinese Party. Two weeks later, Pravda published a feature article entitled “The leader of the Chinese people, Mao Tse-tung,” which portrayed Mao in florid, tear-jerking language as an almost Chekhovian invalid struggling heroically against illness and privation.

In mid-November a messenger arrived in North Shaanxi from Moscow, the first direct liaison for well over a year. He had traveled through the Gobi Desert disguised as a trader wearing a sheepskin coat. In his head he carried codes for resuming radio contact with Moscow, and he brought a radio operator with him. Within a matter of months, the radio link with Moscow was restored, and the person who controlled it at the Chinese end was Mao.

The messenger brought Stalin’s word that the Chinese Reds should “get close to the Soviet Union” by making for the border with Russia’s satellite, Outer Mongolia. The move “to link up with the Soviet Union” could now start.

CHIANG KAI-SHEK WAS less successful in achieving his private agenda. On 18 October, the day the Long March ended for Mao, Chiang saw Soviet ambassador Bogomolov for the first time since just before the March had started. Chiang proposed a “secret military treaty” with Russia. This could only be aimed against Japan, which had stepped up its efforts to detach five provinces from northern China by offering them bogus “independence.” The Russian response was that Chiang must first “regulate relations with the CCP.” The Generalissimo’s close associate and founder of the Chinese FBI, Chen Li-fu, began secret talks straightaway with Bogomolov and Soviet military attaché Lepin on the nuts and bolts of a deal with the CCP — even referring to “cooperation” with the Reds.

During these talks Chen Li-fu asked Bogomolov for the release of Chiang’s son Ching-kuo. Chen told us: “I said to him: We two countries are signing a treaty now, and we are on very good terms. Why do you still detain our leader’s son? Why can’t you release him?” (Loyally, Chen added that he was acting without telling Chiang—“He would not have wanted me to make this request.” This remark reflects the understanding among the few people in on Chiang’s Reds-for-son exchange that the deal must never be attributed to him, or allowed to leak out.)

But Stalin still refused to free his hostage. Ching-kuo had by now been separated from his parents for exactly ten years. In March that year, in his heavy machinery plant in the Urals, love had softened the young man’s bleak life when he married a Russian technician called Faina Vakhreva. In December they were to have their first child, born into the same captivity that Ching-kuo himself would endure for many more moons, as Mao’s fortunes rose, and rose again.

At the time, the lie was told in very vague words to only a few people. Mao later embellished it into a vivid story about how Kuo-tao had sent a cable to his men ordering them to “liquidate” him and the Center. And this became the official version. But Mao did not produce this claim until eighteen months later, on 30 March 1937, when he was trying to purge Kuo-tao. Until then, although there had been a Party resolution denouncing Kuo-tao for “splitting the Red Army,” it did not include this charge. Nor was the accusation mentioned in any of the many subsequent telegrams to Kuo-tao from Mao and his armies. Even Mao’s cable to Moscow denouncing Kuo-tao as soon as radio links were restored in June 1936 did not have a word about it. All this proves that there was no order from Kuo-tao to harm Mao.

There was one small skirmish at a pass called Lazikou, on 17 September. Although this involved only a handful of men, it was later blown up into a major battle — and a major victory. The reason for this fabrication was that, for Mao to validate his split from Kuo-tao, he had to show at least one feat of arms in the period after he broke away from him. In fact, Mao was simply let through at Lazikou.