Mao: The Unknown Story

15. THE TIMELY DEATH OF MAO’S HOST (1935–36 AGE 41–42)

MAO’S HOME for the next decade was the Yellow Earth Plateau in northwest China, near the Yellow River, the second biggest in China after the Yangtze, and the cradle of Chinese civilization. The base had a population of nearly one million, occupying well over 30,000 sq km, mainly in northern Shaanxi, and straddling the border with Gansu province to the west. Far from the country’s heartland, in those days it was the only secure Red territory in the whole of China.

The landscape was dominated by vast stretches of loess, yellow earth, that looked bleak and barren, broken only by long jagged gorges, often hundreds of meters deep, slicing dramatically through the soft substrate formed with the passage of time by minuscule particles of dust blown in from the nearby Gobi Desert. Most of the dwellings were carved into the yellow hillsides. One could gaze far into the distance and often not see a single soul. Wuqi, the first “town” Mao saw on arrival, had only some thirty residents. This area was unique in being relatively underpopulated, and enjoyed something unheard-of elsewhere in China — arable land to spare. Chiang Kai-shek had picked the locality to keep the Red Army alive, but small.

The founder of the base was a local Communist called Liu Chih-tan, who had an army of 5,000 men — more than Mao. For the local Red sympathizers, Chih-tan was a hero. For the Spanish Catholic bishop of the area, whose brand-new cathedral and other properties were seized by Chih-tan’s men in July 1935, he was “daring, and a conspirator in everything that was subversive.”

As Mao approached Chih-tan’s base, he pointedly remarked that Chih-tan’s leadership “does not seem to be correct,” meaning Chih-tan was politically unsound. And it seems that Mao gave secret orders to the Party bureau whose jurisdiction covered Chih-tan’s area (the Northern Bureau) to carry out a purge there. In mid-September Party envoys descended on the base, where they were joined on the 15th by a Red Army unit 3,400 strong which had been driven there from a different part of China. Together, these new arrivals struck out in a savage purge. Although Chih-tan’s forces were superior in strength, he offered no resistance either to the takeover or to the purge. When he was recalled from the front, and discovered on the way that he was going to be arrested, he turned himself in.

The Party envoys condemned Chih-tan for being “consistently right-wing” (newspeak for moderate), and charged him with being an agent of Chiang’s who had “created a Red Army base in order to wipe out the Red Army.” His willingness to submit to Party authority, far from being appreciated as an act of loyalty, was twisted against him, and he was accused of being “cunning, in order to deceive the Party into trusting him.” Hideous torture was applied. A colleague of Chih-tan’s had his right thigh pierced to the bone by a red-hot wire. Many were buried alive. One survivor wrote in 1992: “We were imprisoned in heavy leg-irons … We heard that the pit to bury us alive had already been dug …” Between 200 and 300 people are estimated to have been killed.

It was at this moment that Mao arrived — in time to play the benign arbiter. He ordered arrests and executions to be suspended, and released Chih-tan and his comrades at the end of November. The purge against them was ruled to have been “a serious error.” Two scapegoats were reprimanded.

Mao thus managed both to sabotage the local Red leadership and to present himself as the man who saved them. This put him in a position to take over their base. Thanks to the purge, Chih-tan and his comrades were already sufficiently intimidated by the time Mao turned up (Chih-tan could barely walk after being heavily shackled), and Mao was able to exclude them from decision-making positions and from key military jobs without prompting major resistance. Chih-tan, the founder of the base, was given a lowly post as commander of a detachment titled “the 28th Army,” which was really just a bunch of new recruits, onto whom Mao foisted a trusted man of his own as commissar, and therefore Chih-tan’s boss. Chih-tan did not demur; he endorsed Mao’s authority publicly, and asked his comrades who had been victimized to put the interests of the revolution before their personal sufferings.

Mao did not want to be seen to be purging Chih-tan, as he meant to exploit his name to lend legitimacy and prestige to his own rule. But nor did he intend to retain him — because he was a local. Mao was going to be involved in extorting food, money, soldiers and laborers out of the population, as the CCP had done in other bases before; and, as in the case of virtually all other Red bases, he knew that these policies were sure to meet resistance from local leaders, who might well lead a popular uprising against the Party. Mao had a different method for dealing with Chih-tan from those he used against other potential threats.

AS SOON AS he settled down, Mao went ahead with his project of trying to open a passage to a Russian-controlled border where he could pick up supplies, and especially arms. His plan involved crossing the Yellow River into the much richer province of Shanxi to the east, to acquire new manpower and provisions, even possibly to build a base, before turning north towards Russian-controlled Outer Mongolia.

The expedition began in February 1936. It garnered some spoils and recruits, but was rapidly driven back west of the Yellow River by Chiang’s troops, without getting anywhere near the Mongolian border. During this brief operation Chih-tan met his death, at the age of thirty-three. According to history books, he died in combat, but the overwhelming evidence points to murder.

Chih-tan was shot on 14 April 1936, at a place called Sanjiao, a ferry town on the Yellow River. The official account claimed that an enemy machine-gun that had engaged an advancing Red Army unit put a round in his heart. Chih-tan was not with the assaulting unit, nor caught in cross-fire. He was about 200 meters away, up a small hill from which he was observing through a telescope. The machine-gun that reportedly killed him was firing in a totally different direction, and if the official story is to be believed, it suddenly swiveled round and loosed a single burst that miraculously hit Chih-tan in the heart — at 200 meters. This machine-gun seems to have had a sniper’s accuracy.

Only two people were with Chih-tan when he was hit. One was the Political Security man in his unit, whose name was Pei, a star of the Chinese KGB. On the Long March, he had been given the crucial job of watching over the porters carrying the assets of the regime’s bank. The other man present was a bodyguard. After Chih-tan was shot, Pei sent the bodyguard to “fetch a doctor,” according to his own account, leaving himself the only man around when Chih-tan “completely stopped breathing.” There seems little doubt that Chih-tan was killed by Pei.

The sequence of events surrounding Chih-tan’s death strongly suggests that it was choreographed by Mao. A week before, Mao cabled Chih-tan that the 28th Army unit, “from now on comes directly under this HQ.” There was no discernible reason for this order — except, of course, that this way whatever happened to Chih-tan from then on would not be reported through the normal chain of command, but directly to Mao. Two days after that, Mao appointed Chih-tan to the Military Council, from which he had previously been excluded. This amounted to Chih-tan’s elevation to a major military position. If he died now, he would have the status of a hero and his men would be kept happy. Finally, on the 13th, it was Mao himself who ordered Chih-tan to go to Sanjiao, where he was killed the very next day.

When Chih-tan was buried, his widow was kept away from the interment. “You are not well,” Chou En-lai told her, “and seeing him will make you sadder.” This was an order. Seven years were to pass before she was allowed to have him exhumed, by which time the corpse had decomposed. The coffin was opened, at her request, when Chih-tan was given a public burial in a special shrine. Mao wrote an inscription, calling Chih-tan’s death “a surprise.” This was at a time when Mao particularly needed to ensure that there would not be any trouble in the base, and he was using the dead Chih-tan to lend himself authority.

Chih-tan was the only top leader of a Red base ever to die at the front. In addition, his former left-and right-hand commanders both fell dead in quick succession within weeks of him being killed — Yang Qi in March, and Yang Sen at the beginning of May. Within a few months of Mao arriving, all three top Shaanxi commanders were killed — a fate that befell none of the commanders from any other Red Army unit.

With the deaths of Chih-tan and these two top colleagues, any serious potential danger of rebellion against Mao’s rule over the base was removed. Thereafter, although there were small-scale revolts among the locals, there was no uprising big enough to threaten Mao’s regime.

As with the Long March, the Reds pretended that the goal was to fight the Japanese, and called it the “Anti-Japanese Vanguard,” with slogans like “Going east to fight Japan.” But this was pure propaganda. Mao’s force did not even try to get near the Japanese.

16. CHIANG KAI-SHEK KIDNAPPED (1935–36 AGE 41–42)

WHEN MAO arrived in the northwest at the end of the Long March in October 1935, his aim, other than sheer survival, was to open up a passage to the border of a Russian-controlled territory so as to receive the arms and other supplies that would enable him to expand. Chiang Kai-shek wanted the Reds kept penned in their corral. The man he assigned to the task was the former warlord of Manchuria, Chang Hsueh-liang, “the Young Marshal,” who had his HQ in the city of Xian, the capital of Shaanxi province. Mao was in the same province, some 300 km to the north.

There were two Russian-controlled territories through which arms could be delivered: Xinjiang, over 1,000 km to the west-northwest, and Outer Mongolia, more than 500 km due north. The Young Marshal’s vast army of some 300,000 was stationed in the provinces giving access to both of these.

The Young Marshal’s American pilot, Royal Leonard, has left a description of a worldly man: “My first impression … was that here was the president of a Rotary Club: rotund, prosperous, with an easy, affable manner … We were friends in five minutes …” After inheriting Manchuria when his warlord father (“the Old Marshal”) was assassinated in June 1928, the Young Marshal placed his domain under Chiang’s central government, while remaining its chief until Japan invaded it in 1931. He then retreated into China proper with 200,000 troops, and was subsequently given various important posts by Chiang. He had an apparently intimate relationship with Chiang and his wife. Thirteen years the Generalissimo’s junior, he was fond of saying that Chiang was “like a daddy to me.”

But behind the Generalissimo’s back, the Young Marshal plotted to supplant him. Having governed a land larger than France and England together, it irked him to be Chiang’s subordinate. He aspired to rule all of China. To this end, he had earlier made approaches to the Russians and had tried to visit the Soviet Union when he was in Europe in 1933, but the Russians were very wary and turned him down. Only four years earlier, in 1929, Stalin had invaded Manchuria and fought a brief war against him after he had seized the Russian-controlled railway in Manchuria. Moreover, the Young Marshal had expressed admiration for fascism, and was friendly with Mussolini and his family. In August 1935 a statement put out from Moscow under the name of the CCP called him “scum” and a “traitor.”

But once he was appointed Mao’s warden later that year, Moscow performed a U-turn. The Young Marshal had become worth courting. He could make the CCP’s life easier and, more importantly, help them link up with Russian supplies. Within weeks of Mao arriving in the northwest, Russian diplomats were deep in talks with the Young Marshal.

He traveled to Shanghai and Nanjing, the capital, to meet the Russians in secret. To cover his tracks, he wove a camouflage of frivolity. He had a reputation as a playboy, and happily played up this image. One day, his American pilot recalled, the Young Marshal got him to “fly the plane in a vertical bank, one wing in the street, past the windows of the Park Hotel where his friends lived. We passed within ten feet of the façade, the noise of the motor rattling the panes like castanets.” This flamboyant show was staged outside the hotel room where one of the Young Marshal’s girlfriends was staying. “Perhaps this will make you smile,” the Young Marshal, aged ninety-one in 1993, chuckled to us. “At that time, Tai Li [Chiang’s intelligence chief] tried everything he could to find out my whereabouts, and he thought I went to have a good time with my girlfriends. But in fact, I was doing deals …”

The Young Marshal made clear to the Russians that he was ready to form an alliance with the Chinese Reds and engage in “decisive struggle against the Japanese”—i.e., declare war on Japan, which Chiang had not done. In return, he wanted Moscow to back him to replace Chiang as the head of the country.

This package contained extremely attractive features for Stalin, including the one thing the Kremlin boss most wanted — for China to wage all-out war against Japan. Japan had been encroaching on China since 1931, and had been nibbling away ever since. After annexing Manchuria, Tokyo set up another puppet regime in part of northern China in November 1935, but Chiang had been avoiding all-out war. Stalin was anxious that Tokyo might turn north and attack the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s goal was to use China to steer Tokyo away from the Soviet Union by dragging the Japanese into the vast interior of China and bogging them down there. Moscow worked hard to fan sentiment in China for such an all-out war with Japan, while keeping its own agenda under wraps. It took a hand in major student demonstrations; and its many agents, particularly Mme Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek’s sister-in-law, formed pressure groups to lobby Nanjing for action.

Chiang did not want to surrender to Japan, but nor did he want to declare war. He thought that China had no realistic chance of winning, and that taking on Tokyo would lead to his country’s destruction. He opted for a very unusual limbo — neither surrendering nor fighting a full-scale war. He was able to hang on in this state thanks to China’s size, and the fact that the Japanese were only encroaching gradually. Chiang may even have harbored the hope that Japan would soon turn on Russia and leave the rest of China alone.

The Young Marshal’s proposal suited Stalin, but Stalin did not trust him. Nor did he believe that the former Manchurian warlord was capable of holding China together to fight such a war. If China lapsed into internecine strife, it would facilitate the Japanese conquest — and, a fortiori, redouble the Japanese threat to the Soviet Union.

Moscow was too canny to reject the Young Marshal’s offer outright. The Russians led him on, deluding him that they were considering it — so that he would help the Chinese Reds. Russian diplomats told him to establish direct contact with the CCP in secret. The first talks between a CCP negotiator and the Young Marshal took place on 20 January 1936.

WHILE THE RUSSIANS were merely stringing the Young Marshal along, Mao was happy to support him to replace Chiang, and wanted a real alliance with him. This was an ideal scenario for Mao. As the Young Marshal would be dependent on the Soviet Union, the CCP would have a pivotal role, and Mao might even become the power behind the throne for the whole of China. He instructed his negotiator, Li Ke-nong, to propose an anti-Chiang alliance with the Young Marshal, and to promise to back him as head of a new national government in place of Chiang. The negotiator was told to “hint” that the offer had Moscow’s authorization, by suggesting that funds and arms would be no problem.

The Young Marshal naturally wanted to have Mao’s promises nailed down by the Russians themselves. And it seemed this was very much on the cards when a scheme was soon put to him to get a senior envoy of his to Moscow. In January, a certain “Pastor Dong” arrived at the Young Marshal’s HQ from Shanghai. Dong, who had once been a pastor at St. Peter’s in Shanghai in the 1920s, was a Communist intelligence operative. The lapsed Pastor told the Young Marshal that Mao’s sons were secretly in his care in Shanghai, and that there was a plan to send them to Russia, to the special school for the children of foreign Communist leaders run by the Comintern. He proposed that the Young Marshal assign an envoy to accompany them there.

Mao had three sons by his second wife, Kai-hui, who had been executed by the Nationalists in 1930. After their mother’s death, the boys had been taken to Shanghai and looked after by the Communist underground.

The children had been having a tough time. The youngest, An-long, died at the age of four soon after he came to Shanghai. The other two, An-ying and Anching, had to live a secret life, unable to go to school or to make friends outside the Dong family, where there was constant tension. Dong had deposited them with his ex-wife, whose life was thrown into danger and upheaval by their arrival, and who had no particular affection for these boys anyway. Sometimes they would run away and live as street urchins. Years later, watching a film about an orphan in Shanghai, An-ying became very emotional and told his wife that his brother and he had led a similar life, sleeping on the pavements and scavenging through rubbish dumps for food and cigarette stubs. During all these years, Mao had never sent a word to them.

Moscow now decided to bring Mao’s sons to Russia, where they could be looked after and put through school. As in the case of Chiang Kai-shek’s son when Chiang was rising to the top, the aim was also to keep the boys as hostages. Stalin was personally involved with this decision. Mao had no objection.

Moscow’s offer to the Young Marshal to have an envoy of his escort the boys to Soviet Russia thus killed two birds with one stone. This way, the Young Marshal would guarantee the boys’ safety during the journey and look after all the logistics, as well as footing the considerable bill for an entourage, which included a nanny. And, most important, the Young Marshal would see the invitation to send an envoy as a sign that Moscow was seriously interested in doing a deal, which could not be done under Chiang Kai-shek’s surveillance in China.

The Young Marshal was delighted, and quickly made all the arrangements. His representative and the boys sailed from China for Marseille on 26 June. Moscow had told the Young Marshal they could collect their Russian visas in Paris.

THAT JUNE, two provinces in southern China, Guangdong and Guangxi, formed an alliance and rebelled against Chiang’s government. Mao tried to persuade the Young Marshal to seize this opportunity to do likewise and turn the northwest into a breakaway state in alliance with the Reds. His aim, he told his Politburo, was to create an entity “like Outer Mongolia”—i.e., a Russian satellite.

But the Young Marshal was not keen. He wanted to run the whole of China, not just part of it. And Moscow was downright hostile to the plan. At this time, in late June, the CCP’s radio links with Moscow were reestablished after a gap of twenty months. In the first telegram to the Comintern after the break, Mao requested endorsement for a breakaway northwest state. The plan was sent to Stalin, who was not pleased. He wanted a united China that would drag the Japanese into an all-out war, not a dismembered China.

Within days of Mao sending his telegram, the rebellion by Guangdong and Guangxi collapsed, ignominiously, not least because popular opinion was vehemently against any separatist movement. Stalin was confirmed in his belief that Chiang was the only person who could hold China together. On 15 August Moscow sent the CCP a milestone order, telling them to stop treating Chiang as an enemy, and count him as an ally. “It is incorrect to treat Chiang Kai-shek the same as the Japanese … You must work for the cessation of hostilities between the Red Army and Chiang Kai-shek’s army, and for an agreement … to struggle jointly against the Japanese …”; “everything must be subordinated to the anti-Japanese cause.” Stalin now wanted the CCP to support Chiang as the head of an undivided China, at least for the time being.

Moscow brusquely ordered the CCP to enter serious negotiations with Chiang for an alliance. Mao had to accede, and talks about a “United Front” began in September between the CCP and Chiang’s representatives. Chiang had initiated the rapprochement. At the time the Long March ended, he had made overtures to Moscow, but the Russians told him he had to talk “directly with the Chinese [CP],” as a way of promoting the CCP.

Both Moscow and Mao kept the Young Marshal in the dark about this policy shift, and continued to mislead him on the issue that most concerned him — replacing Chiang. When the Young Marshal told Soviet ambassador Bogomolov in late July that he “hoped” that his “bloc with the [CCP], directed against Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese, would be supported by the USSR,” the ambassador said absolutely nothing to suggest that Moscow was dead set against this notion. For his part, Mao encouraged the Young Marshal to go on thinking that Moscow might back him.

ALTHOUGH HE HAD decided to back Chiang as the head of China, Stalin was in no way cutting back on his clandestine efforts to build up the Chinese Red Army. In early September 1936 he endorsed a plan to ship a large cargo of arms to the CCP through Outer Mongolia. Mao’s wish list had included “monthly aid of 3 million dollars,” as well as “planes, heavy artillery, shells, infantry rifles, anti-aircraft machine-guns, pontoons,” together with Soviet personnel to fly the planes and operate the artillery. On 18 October he heard from the Comintern that “The goods are not as many as you requested in your cable of the 2nd [October] … and there are no planes or heavy artillery …” Still, the “foreign company” handling the shipment, a GRU dummy, would “supply 150 vehicles and provide drivers and gasoline; they can make two return trips … with about 550 tons to 600 tons” each trip. The number of rifles was almost exactly the same as the Russians sent to Spain, where the civil war had just broken out.

In October the Chinese Red Army began its operation to smash through to a delivery point in the desert near the Outer Mongolian border. At this stage, Mao had 20,000 troops in the base, and the other Red Army branches were about to converge there in response to his summons to join him. They included the troops led by his now disabled rival Chang Kuo-tao, who had spent the winter on the Tibetan border, at the mercy of Nationalist bombing. Thousands froze to death, and many others developed snow blindness. During the previous year, Kuo-tao had lost half the 80,000 troops he had commanded when he met up with Mao in June 1935.

Although he still had twice as many men, Kuo-tao now came as a junior partner. Sensing that he was done for, he became “very emotional,” as his colleagues witnessed. “He even shed tears. He said: ‘I’m finished. When we get to North Shaanxi, I’m going to prison …’ ” Though Kuo-tao was not exactly imprisoned, Mao was eventually to wreck his army further — and then purge him. But for now, Mao needed Kuo-tao’s large and efficient force to fight to the Outer Mongolia border.

The other branch of the Red Army that came to Mao now was headed by Ho Lung, a tough former outlaw. He had been herded to North Shaanxi by Chiang Kai-shek from his base on the Hunan — Hubei border. The three branches of the Red Army joined hands on 9 October 1936, making Mao the chief of an army of almost 80,000 men, twenty times the number he had fielded just a year before.

This was a formidable force, but in order to get to the Russian arms the Reds had to break through a powerful Nationalist army, and Chiang was determined to stop them. On 22 October he flew to Xian to take personal command, and this put the Young Marshal in a jam. The Young Marshal duly alerted the Reds about Chiang’s plans, as well as giving them cash and winter clothes, but that was his limit: he could not defy Chiang’s orders openly. So his men ended up fighting the Reds. Within a week, Mao’s push for the Russian supplies had been thwarted. A contingent 21,800 strong that had crossed the Yellow River was stranded on the other side. The main body of the Red Army pulled back to its corral in North Shaanxi, and was hemmed in again.

Mao asked Moscow for money urgently: “Be quick,” he cabled. The Comintern immediately sent US$550,000, but it could not solve the long-term problems. For food, there was just coarse black beans. Housing in this region was mainly yao-dong, quarters dug into hills, like grander caves, and many of the troops lacked even these. It had started to snow, and the soldiers had threadbare clothes and straw sandals. At the front, Peng De-huai, the chief commander, was living in a shepherd’s shelter, a hole in the ground one meter deep and two meters wide, on the edge of the desert, battered by furious sandstorms. Even Mao was enduring discomfort, as the Party Center had been forced into the small town of Baoan, where he and his heavily pregnant wife were living in a dank cave, with water dripping from the roof. Once, when a bodyguard tried to push the door open, he was stung by an outsize scorpion. Plague-bearing rats abounded, half the size of house cats, and so bold that they would sit on people’s chests while they slept and flick their tails across their faces, waking them up with a start.

BY THE END OF October 1936, the Reds were desperate. The Young Marshal saw an opportunity to rescue them, and gain favor with Moscow. His plan was simple, and extreme: to kidnap Chiang, who was about to step onto his turf. Even though the Young Marshal had not received the explicit commitment from Moscow that he had been seeking (his envoy had been given the runaround about his Russian visa), he calculated that saving the Chinese Red Army and having Chiang in his custody would change the whole equation for Stalin. This was a gamble, but the Young Marshal was a gambler. “My philosophy is gamble,” he had once said to his inner circle. “I might lose once or twice, but as long as the game goes on, the time will come when I get all my stakes back.” Having Chiang on his own turf was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The Young Marshal discussed his plan with Mao’s secret liaison, Yeh Jian-ying, telling Yeh he intended to stage a “coup d’état,” using this term (which in Chinese is transliterated as ku-die-da). On 29 October, Yeh cabled Mao, using veiled language, that “there is a proposal to stay Chiang.” On 5 November, Yeh left for Mao’s place, carrying the coup plan.

The idea of kidnapping Chiang was the Young Marshal’s — but it was undoubtedly spurred on by Mao through his envoy, Yeh. The Soviet intelligence insider Aleksandr Titov records that “the question of arresting Chiang Kai-shek was discussed by … Yeh Jian-ying and Chang Hsueh-liang in November 1936.” And Mao very deliberately concealed the plan from Moscow, knowing that Stalin would be dead set against it. Mao was now acting directly contrary to Stalin’s interests. Chiang was more crucial to Stalin than ever. On 25 November Germany and Japan had signed a treaty known as the Anti-Comintern Pact, confronting the USSR with its worst nightmare — belligerent enemies on both flanks in an alliance, with Japanese-backed forces on the move westward along the southern flank of Mongolia, towards Soviet Central Asia. The very day the pact was announced, Stalin urgently ordered the Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov to impress yet more strongly on the CCP that it had to abandon its anti-Chiang position and support a united government: “We need … a government of national defence” in China, Stalin told Dimitrov. “Work out a plan …”

Mao was running a considerable risk of infuriating Stalin by endangering Chiang. He tried to play safe by keeping his distance from the kidnap. Before taking the plunge, the Young Marshal cabled Yeh to return: “Vital thing to discuss. Please come instantly.” Mao held Yeh back, while pretending to the Young Marshal that Yeh was on his way. Then he spurred the Young Marshal on by wiring him that there was no prospect of the Communists reaching any compromise with Chiang, and saying the Reds were determined to continue their war against the Generalissimo. Mao gave the Young Marshal the impression that he, the Young Marshal, was their only possible partner, implying that Moscow would accept this.

WHEN HE GOT to Xian on 4 December, Chiang made no exceptional arrangements for his personal security. His immediate quarters were guarded by several dozen of his own staff, but the gate and outer perimeter of the residence were patrolled by the Young Marshal’s men. The Young Marshal was even able to bring the kidnappers to reconnoiter Chiang’s residence, at a hot spring on the outskirts of town, and to check out the Generalissimo’s bedroom.

At dawn on 12 December, Chiang was kidnapped. He had just finished his morning exercises, part of his strict routine, and was getting dressed when he heard gunfire. His quarters were attacked by some 400 of the Young Marshal’s men. Chiang’s guards resisted, and many were shot dead, including his chief of security. Chiang managed to escape into the hills behind, where he was found hours later hiding in a crevasse, clad only in his nightshirt, barefoot and covered with dust, and with an injured back.

Just beforehand, the Young Marshal had informed Mao that he was about to act. When Mao received the cable from his secretary, he beamed: “Go back to bed. There will be good news in the morning!”

This assassination is generally attributed to the Japanese, but Russian intelligence sources have recently claimed that it was in fact organized, on Stalin’s orders, by the man later responsible for the death of Trotsky, Naum Eitingon, and dressed up as the work of the Japanese.

This base also went through bloody purges conducted by the Reds between 1932 and 1934. Ho Lung himself said later: “in this one purge alone, over 10,000 were killed. Now [1961] there are only a few women comrades alive, and this is because men were killed first … and then the enemy came before [the purgers] got around to the women …” “Even today in the area … they dig out bones from one big pit after another.” Survivors recalled that many had been “put in jute sacks and thrown into Lake Hong with big stones tied to them. Fishermen did not dare to go fishing in the lake, because so many corpses came up, and the color of the lake changed.”

These funds, as well as some further transfers, were sent through Mme Sun Yat-sen, from America.

17. A NATIONAL PLAYER (1936 AGE 42–43)

WHEN THE NEWS reached Party HQ that Chiang Kai-shek had been kidnapped, jubilant leaders crowded into Mao’s cave. Mao was “laughing like mad,” a colleague recalled. Now that Chiang was caught, Mao had one paramount goal: to see him dead. If Chiang was killed, there would be a power vacuum — and therefore a good opportunity for Russia to intervene and help to bring the CCP, and himself, to power.

In his first cables to Moscow after the event, Mao implored the Russians to get seriously involved. Choosing his words with care, he solicited their consent to killing Chiang, saying that the CCP wanted to “demand that Nanjing sack Chiang Kai-shek and deliver him to the people for trial.” This was a euphemistic expression, unmistakably implying a death sentence. Knowing that his own goals were different from Stalin’s, Mao pretended not to have heard about the kidnapping until after it had happened, and promised that the CCP “would not issue public statements for a few days.”

Meanwhile, he was maneuvering busily behind Moscow’s back to get Chiang killed. In his first cable to the Young Marshal after the kidnapping, on 12 December, Mao urged: “The best option is to kill [Chiang].” Mao tried to dispatch his ace diplomat, Chou En-lai, to Xian at once. Chou had negotiated with the Young Marshal earlier in the year, and they seemed to have hit it off. Mao wanted Chou to persuade the Young Marshal “to carry out the final measure” (in Chou’s words), i.e., to kill Chiang.

Without spelling out the real purpose of Chou’s mission, Mao solicited an invitation for Chou from the Young Marshal. At the time, the Reds’ HQ was several days’ ride on horseback from Xian, at Baoan, nearly 300 km to the north; so Mao asked the Young Marshal to send a plane to collect Chou at the nearby city of Yenan (then held by the Young Marshal), where there was an airstrip which Standard Oil had built when it was prospecting in the area earlier in the century. To encourage the Young Marshal to act quickly, Mao made him a spurious promise on the 13th: “We have made arrangements with the Comintern, the details of which we will tell you later.” The clear implication was that Chou would be bringing news of a plan coordinated with Moscow.

What the Young Marshal needed was not off-the-record promises relayed by the CCP, but Russia’s public endorsement. Yet on the 14th, front-page articles in the two main Soviet papers, Pravda and Izvestia, strongly condemned his action as helping the Japanese, and unambiguously endorsed Chiang. Two days into the kidnapping, the Young Marshal could see that the game was up.

He turned a deaf ear to Mao’s suggestion to send Chou. But Mao dispatched Chou anyway, telling the Young Marshal on the 15th that Chou was coming, and asking for a plane to pick him up in Yenan. When Chou reached Yenan, there was no plane, and the city gate was closed to him; he had to wait all night outside the walls, in sub-zero temperatures. “The guards refused to open the gate and refused to listen to reason,” Mao wired the Young Marshal, exhorting him to do something. The Young Marshal was literally freezing Chou out, an indication of how bitter he felt about the Reds misleading him over Moscow’s attitude.

On the 17th he relented. He was looking for a way to end the fiasco, so he sent his Boeing to fetch Chou. His American pilot, Royal Leonard, was shocked to find he was carrying Reds (who had only recently been peppering his plane). En route back that snowy afternoon, he played a trick on his passengers. “I deliberately picked rough air,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Occasionally, I peeked back into the cabin and enjoyed watching the Communists … holding their black beards aside with one hand and vomiting into a can held in the other.”

The Young Marshal accepted Chou through gritted teeth, though he presented an amicable façade and played along with his guest. When Chou urged him to kill the Generalissimo, he pretended he would do so “when civil war is unavoidable and Xian is besieged” by government forces.

Mao had in fact been trying to provoke a war between Nanjing and Xian. He hoped to trigger this off by moving Red troops towards Nanjing. On the 15th he secretly ordered his top commanders to “strike at the enemy’s head: the Nanjing government …” But he had to scrap the plan, as it would have been suicidal for the Red Army, and there was no guarantee it would set off a Nanjing — Xian war. To his delight, on the 16th Nanjing declared war on the Young Marshal, moving armies towards Xian and bombing the Young Marshal’s troops outside the city. Mao urged the Young Marshal not just to fight back, but to broaden the fighting into a major war by striking out towards Nanjing. The following day, Mao cabled him, saying: “The enemy’s jugulars are Nanjing and [two key railway lines]. If 20 to 30 thousand … troops can be dispatched to strike these railway lines … the overall situation will change at once. Please do consider this.” Mao’s hope was that by taking such action, the Young Marshal would burn his bridges with Nanjing and thus be more likely to kill Chiang.

WHILE MAO WAS maneuvering to have Chiang killed, Stalin put his foot down to save the Generalissimo. On 13 December, the day after Chiang was seized, the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Nanjing was summoned by acting prime minister H. H. Kung (Chiang’s brother-in-law) to be told that “word was around” that the CCP was involved in the coup, and that “if Mr. Chiang’s safety was endangered, the anger of the nation would extend from the CCP to the Soviet Union and could put pressure on [the Chinese government] to join with Japan against the Soviet Union.” Stalin understood that the kidnapping might pose an urgent threat to his strategic interests.

At midnight on the 14th, the phone rang in the office of Comintern chief Dimitrov. Stalin was on the line. “Was it with your permission that the events in China took place?” he asked. Dimitrov hastily answered: “No! That would be the greatest service anyone could possibly render Japan. Our position on these events is the same.” Using ominous language, Stalin went on to question the role of the CCP’s delegate at the Comintern, who had submitted to Stalin the draft of a cable to be sent to the CCP in favor of executing Chiang: “Who is this Wang Ming of yours? Is he a provocateur? I hear he wanted to send a telegram to have Chiang killed.” At the time, Dimitrov’s Chinese assistant recalled, “you could not find anyone” at Comintern HQ who did not think that “Chiang must be finished off.” Even Stalin’s top man at the Comintern, the normally cool Manuilsky, “rubbed his hands, embraced me, and exclaimed: ‘Our dear friend has been caught, aha!’ ”

Wang Ming pleaded that the draft cable had been suggested by the deputy head of the GRU, Artur Artuzov. Artuzov was soon arrested and accused of being a spy. Before he was shot, he protested his innocence in a letter written in his own blood, which, his jailer noted icily, had come “from his nose.” Stalin spared Wang Ming. And Dimitrov scrambled to clear himself and lay the blame on Mao. He wrote to Stalin: “in spite of our warnings, the … Chinese Party in fact entered into very close, friendly relations with [the Young Marshal].” More damningly, Dimitrov told Stalin: “it is hard to imagine [the Young Marshal] would have undertaken his adventurist action without coordination with them [Mao and his colleagues] or even without their participation.” This was clearly suggesting that Mao was lying about having no prior knowledge of the event, and that Mao had flouted Moscow’s orders.

Stalin was suspicious that Mao might be in cahoots with the Japanese. Stalin had already begun to have almost all the Soviet “old China hands” denounced and interrogated under torture. Four days after Chiang was kidnapped, a leading detainee “confessed” to being involved in a Trotskyist plot to provoke an attack by Japan (and Germany) on Russia. Mao’s own name soon surfaced in confessions, and a hefty dossier on him was compiled, with accusations that he was an agent of the Japanese, as well as a Trotskyist.

Dimitrov sent a stern message to Mao on the 16th. It condemned the kidnapping, saying that it “can objectively only damage the anti-Japanese united front and help Japan’s aggression against China.” Its key point was that “the CCP must take a decisive stand in favour of a peaceful resolution.” This was an order to secure the release and reinstatement of the Generalissimo.

WHEN THE CABLE arrived, Mao reportedly “flew into a rage … swore and stamped his feet.” His next move was to pretend that the message had never reached him. He kept it secret from his Politburo, from the Young Marshal, and also from Chou En-lai, who was en route to Xian to try to persuade the Young Marshal to kill Chiang. Mao went on maneuvering for Chiang to be killed.

This was a high-risk tactic vis-à-vis Moscow. Mao was not simply withholding from the Kremlin the fact that he had encouraged the kidnap plot, he was also suppressing — and defying — a direct order from Stalin. But for Mao, the vistas opened up by the elimination of Chiang outweighed the risks.

But the Generalissimo was not about to disappear off the map. Once the Young Marshal knew he had no Moscow backing, which was immediately after the kidnap, he decided to keep Chiang safe. Mao had proved worthless. In spite of all its posturing in private communications, the CCP kept a public silence for three long days after the kidnapping, voicing no support for the Young Marshal. Its first official statement did not emerge till the 15th. It made no mention of backing the Young Marshal to be head of China, as Mao had specifically offered earlier. Instead, it recognized the authority of Nanjing.

The Young Marshal’s only option was to stick with Chiang. That meant he had to set Chiang free. Moreover, he realized that the only way he himself could survive was to leave Xian with Chiang and place himself in Chiang’s hands. There were many in Nanjing who wanted him dead and who were sure to send assassins after him. Chiang’s custody was the only place where he could be safe. And by escorting Chiang out of captivity he could also hope to win the Generalissimo’s goodwill. His gamble that Chiang would not kill him turned out to be a good bet. After house arrest under Chiang and his successors for over half a century, when he was both detained and protected, he was released, and died in his bed in Hawaii, aged 100, in 2001, having outlived Chiang and Mao by over a quarter of a century.

On 14 December, the day Moscow publicly condemned the coup, the Young Marshal went to see Chiang, and stood in front of him in silence, weeping. Chiang registered that his captor showed “considerable remorse.” Later that day the Young Marshal told Chiang he realized that the kidnap was “a foolish and ill-considered action” and wanted to release him, secretly. Chiang gave him active cooperation by making sure Nanjing did not rock the boat. When Nanjing declared war on the Young Marshal on the 16th, Chiang got a message out at once telling Nanjing to hold its fire. Nanjing suspended military operations, and sent Chiang’s brother-in-law T. V. Soong (known as T.V.) “as a private citizen” to negotiate a deal, as Chiang himself could not be seen to be negotiating with his captors. T.V. arrived in Xian on the 20th, followed two days later by Mme Chiang.

On the 20th, Moscow repeated its cable to the CCP, which Mao had been suppressing, ordering a “peaceful resolution.” Now, Mao had to forward the cable to Chou En-lai, with instructions to help “restore Chiang Kai-shek’s freedom.”

MAO THUS BROUGHT his goals back into alignment with Stalin’s. The CCP demanded that Chiang promise to “stop the policy of ‘exterminating Communists.’ ” It also insisted that Chiang meet Chou, who was right there in Xian. For Chou to talk to Chiang would accord the CCP the status of a major player in national politics, an act whose modern-day equivalent would be for the top man in some notorious terrorist group suddenly to be received by the US president.

At a talk on the 23rd between T. V. Soong, the Young Marshal and Chou, T.V. said he personally agreed to what Chou asked, and would convey the CCP’s demands to the Generalissimo. But Chiang refused to talk to Chou directly, even though he was told he would not be released unless he saw Chou. The talks deadlocked.

Moscow knew what would get the Generalissimo to see Chou. Chiang’s most recent signal to Moscow had been just before the kidnap, in November, when the Chinese Red Army had its back to the wall after failing to reach the Russian arms supplies. On that occasion, Chiang’s ambassador in Moscow had asked for the return of Chiang’s son, Ching-kuo, and Moscow had said “No.” Now it was ready to respond. Late on 24 December the former Party leader, Po Ku, arrived in Xian, bearing special news. This piece of news got Chou into Chiang’s bedroom on Christmas Day. Chou told Chiang that his son Ching-kuo “would return.” It was only after receiving this promise from Stalin that Chiang agreed to the Reds’ demands, and invited Chou “to come to Nanjing for direct negotiations.” From this moment on, the CCP stopped being officially regarded as bandits, and was treated as a proper political party.

The Chiang — Chou meeting in Xian was brief, but it wrapped up the Reds-for-son deal that Chiang had been working on for years. This marked the end of the civil war between the CCP and the Nationalists.

THAT AFTERNOON the Chiangs left Xian. So did the Young Marshal, flying voluntarily into house arrest. Chiang was at the peak of his popularity. When his car drove into Nanjing, spontaneous crowds lined the streets to hail him. Fireworks crackled all night long. People who experienced those days say that Chiang’s prestige shone like the midday sun. Yet his triumph was short-lived, and the deal that regained his son rebounded against him. His calculation that he could contain Mao and outsmart Stalin was wishful thinking. Mao was uncontainable — and the small CCP had just been promoted to a major “opposition party.”

The Young Marshal’s bitterness against Moscow and the CCP flared briefly during our otherwise very friendly meeting with him fifty-six years later. When we asked him whether the Chinese Communists had told him about the real Soviet attitude towards him before the coup, he snapped back with sudden hostility: “Of course not. You ask a very strange question.”

Mao later tried to claim that the Comintern’s cable of 16 December “was garbled, and could not be decoded,” and that the CCP asked Moscow, on the 18th, to retransmit it. This has to be a fabrication. Radio operators at the core of CCP operations told us that the standard procedure was that if a cable was illegible, they would instantly ask Moscow to retransmit and would definitely not wait for two days — least of all at a time of crisis. Mao told his Politburo on the 19th: “Comintern instructions have not arrived.”

Since then, he has become one of the biggest legends in Chinese history, the subject of endless books and articles, and both admired and denounced. But even his adversaries hardly mention his machinations with the Russians, or that these were the result of personal ambition. To the end of his long life he claimed that the kidnapping was inspired by “pure motives.” To us in 1993, he said: “Mme Chiang understood me well … she said I didn’t want money, I didn’t want territory, I only wanted sacrifice [sic].”

18. NEW IMAGE, NEW LIFE AND NEW WIFE (1937–38 AGE 43–44)

AS SOON AS the dust from the kidnapping settled, in January 1937 Moscow told Mao exactly how it viewed the next stage. The CCP was to abandon its policy of trying to overthrow the government by violence, and stop confiscating land and robbing the rich; instead, it would in effect recognize Nanjing as the legitimate government, and put the Red territory and Red Army under Chiang. Mao accepted the shift as a purely tactical expedient, and the CCP made a public pledge to Nanjing that embodied the policy changes willed by Moscow. This opened a new phase for the Party.

As a quid pro quo, Chiang was to assign some territory to the Red Army, and fund the Communist administration and army. Mao naturally went all out to get the largest possible swath of territory and the highest level of funding. In the end, the Reds were allocated 129,600 square kilometers of ground, with a population of about 2 million, and Yenan as their capital. This settlement brought substantial government funding. Chiang also armed and paid for over 46,000 regular Red troops (the number he officially recognized).

In order to help Mao achieve these gains, Stalin held on to Chiang’s son. Not until he was satisfied about Chiang’s concessions did he deliver. On 3 March the Soviet Politburo decreed, in its peculiar crabbed idiom, “Not to oppose the return to China of Chiang Kai-shek’s son.” Ching-kuo returned to China on 19 April, and was reunited with his father after more than eleven years as a hostage.

During the week-long train journey across Siberia, Ching-kuo was in the custody of the future CCP intelligence chief, Kang Sheng. Only a few weeks before, Kang Sheng had brought Mao’s sons from Paris to Moscow. An-ying and An-ching, aged fourteen and twelve, had been waiting for Russian visas in Paris for months. The Russians had not wanted to admit the Young Marshal’s envoy, who was escorting them, but had not wanted to give a straightforward refusal, so they withheld visas for the whole group. After the Xian kidnap was over, the envoy was told he would not get a visa. The Mao boys arrived in Moscow at the beginning of 1937, and became boarders in the special school for children of foreign Communist leaders. They wrote to their father, sending photos. He rarely replied.

WHILE MAO’S ATTITUDE to his sons was one of indifference, Chiang Kai-shek’s amounted to obsession. In February 1937, when Stalin was still holding Ching-kuo, and Chiang was impatiently waiting for him to be returned, the Generalissimo did another favor to the CCP, which had far-reaching repercussions. He appointed the mole Shao Li-tzu (who had taken Chiang’s son to Russia in 1925) as head of the Nationalists’ Propaganda Department, in charge of the media. Shao’s job was to bring about a change of attitude in the press and in public opinion, which were both fiercely anti-Communist. It was an enormous gesture of good will to Moscow.

Soviet Russia henceforth received wide and enthusiastic coverage. A benign and positive image of the Chinese Communists began to emerge. By summer, Shao and Mao had concocted the idea of publishing a Mao autobiography portraying Mao as a good and kindly man, complete with an appendix of his pronouncements on war with Japan that depicted him as committed to fighting the Japanese. Mao wrote an inscription in the tone of an ardent patriot: “Fight the Japanese imperialists unwaveringly through to the end …” The book came out on 1 November and was a hit. It was this period that gave birth to the myth, which was vital to Mao’s success, that the CCP was the most dedicated anti-Japanese force. It was thanks to this myth that many tens of thousands joined the Communists, including many of those who were later to staff Mao’s regime.

The Mao Tse-tung Autobiography consisted largely of interviews Mao had done with the American journalist Edgar Snow in summer 1936—the only extensive account of his life Mao ever gave. Snow also produced his own book, Red Star Over China, which relied overwhelmingly on interviews with Mao and other Communists, and laid the foundation for the rehabilitation of the Reds, not least by brushing out their blood-soaked past.

The encounter with Snow was no accident. That spring, Mao had asked the Shanghai underground to find a foreign journalist who could publicize his story, plus a doctor. After careful vetting, Mao invited Snow, who combined all the necessary qualities: he was American, wrote for the influential Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune, and was sympathetic. Snow arrived in the Red area in July, with a Lebanese-American doctor, George Hatem, who brought top-secret documents from the Comintern in his medicine case. Snow stayed for three months, while Hatem remained with the Reds for the rest of his life, becoming one of Mao’s doctors, and working in the CCP’s foreign intelligence apparatus.

Mao left nothing to chance, and dictated detailed instructions on handling Snow’s visit: “Security, secrecy, warmth and red carpet.” The Politburo carefully coordinated answers to a questionnaire Snow had to submit beforehand. Mao offered Snow a mixture of valuable information and colossal falsification, which Snow swallowed in toto, calling Mao and the CCP leadership “direct, frank, simple, undevious.” Mao covered up years of torture and murder, such as the AB purges, and invented battles and heroism like the crossing of the Dadu bridge in the trek across China, astutely now titled “the Long March.” He led Snow to believe that, except when he was ill, he had “walked most of the 6,000 miles of the Long March, like the rank and file.” Mao also completely suppressed his links with Moscow, and claimed he wanted friendship with America — a claim that fooled many.

Mao took the added precaution of checking everything Snow wrote afterwards, and amending and rewriting parts. On 26 July 1937 (before Red Star came out) Snow wrote to his wife Helen, who was then in Yenan: “Don’t send me any more notes about people reneging on their stories to me … As it is, with so many things cut out it begins to read like Childe Harold.” Snow omitted to mention this background in Red Star, and instead alleged that Mao “never imposed any censorship on me.” The Chinese edition even gilded Snow, and had him say that he found Mao’s words “honest and true.”

Red Star was published in English in winter 1937–38, and played a big role in swaying Western opinion in favor of Mao. The CCP organized its publication in Chinese, under the title Stories of a Journey to the West, to make it appear impartial. In addition to this book and the Mao Tse-tung Autobiography, a third book was produced out of the Snow material, under another neutral-sounding title, Impressions of Mao Tse-tung.

Red Star—and the two books of edited excerpts — profoundly influenced radical youth in China. Many, like one of the first Tibetan Communists, joined the Communists as a result of reading Snow. It was the beginning of the CCP’s renaissance. Mao was to say that its publication “had a merit no less than the Great Yu controlling floods.” The Great Yu was the mythical emperor who had brought floods under control, thus starting Chinese civilization.

As Chiang Kai-shek’s media chief, Shao played an indispensable role in assisting Snow and promoting Mao and the Reds. By the time Chiang removed Shao from the post after nearly a year, Mao and the Reds had sanitized their image.

FOR THE NEXT DECADE, Mao lived in Yenan, the capital of the territories Chiang assigned to the Reds. He moved into the city on New Year’s Day 1937, through a huge gate, which majestically and silently opened up to columns of Red Army soldiers, marching along the broad dirt road that stretched into the infinity of yellow earth. This ancient city (whose name means “extending peace”) was enclosed by high thick walls that mounted the chain of loess hills far above the city, with battlements exuding warrior stateliness. In dry, crisp air beneath a high blue sky, it was dominated by a nine-story pagoda, built 1,000 years before. Beneath the pagoda was a complex of temples, many appearing to be clinging to the cliffs. Further down, the heavily silted River Yan was joined by the Tu Fu River, named after the great eighth-century poet, who reputedly came here to admire the peonies, a local claim to fame.

Yenan was not only a cultural center, but also a hub of commercial activities. Oil had been discovered in the region. Living quarters built by Standard Oil were now taken over by the Reds, who also appropriated substantial buildings owned by the Spanish Franciscans, including a just-completed cathedral, in which many key Party meetings were to take place. The problem of housing was further eased by the fact that many locals had fled, particularly the relatively wealthy, leaving empty hundreds of houses, some large and beautiful. Mao occupied one such mansion in a place called Phoenix Village. The big courtyard was by local standards grand, with a decorated wall immediately inside, facing the gate, to ward off evil spirits — and for privacy. For the first time in over two years, he settled into some comfort.

One considerable luxury for its place and time was wall heating, which Mao had installed. The usual way of heating a house in northern China was to heat the brick bed, the kang, from underneath, but Mao preferred his proper wooden bed, and for heating, he selected this most deluxe form. Another indulgence was to have several residences. When he later moved to an area called Yang Hill, he kept the house in Phoenix Village, and he kept both when he settled in the compound of the Chinese KGB, the picturesque area known as the Date Garden. In addition to these publicly known residences, Mao had secret dwellings built in secluded valleys, one behind Yang Hill and another behind the Date Garden. Few knew of their existence, then or now.

The most public residence was Yang Hill, which was also the least grand, and closest to the local peasants. Ten households lived in the face of a ravine, against a hill thickly wooded in those days with elms, cypresses and redwood poplar. The houses were yao-dong, unique to this part of the country, which looked like caves hollowed out of the loess slopes. Mao had a row of yao-dong in a courtyard with a small gate surmounted by a tiled roof. One of his neighbors, a peasant family, did the laundry for him. Mao’s cook he had brought with him, for security — as well as culinary — reasons. He also declined to share the peasants’ stone roller for grinding his grain: “Chairman Mao considered things from a safety point of view,” the locals told us. He was surrounded by very tight security, some visible, some not.

For Mao, Yenan provided the first relatively stable and non-violent period for nearly a decade. With peace and a rather good life — and the sudden availability of glamorous, educated young women, who were beginning to trickle into Yenan to the lure of the Reds’ benign new image — Mao started to womanize more or less openly. He confided to a fellow-philanderer that he could only go without sex “for forty days at the most.”

ONE OF THE FIRST young women on the scene was a beautiful (and married) 26-year-old actress, Lily Wu, who arrived in early 1937 and became the star actress of Yenan. Her elegant clothes and manners turned heads in this back-country region, and her flowing, shoulder-length hair, in particular, was the symbol of desirability. Communist women mostly wore bulky uniforms and had shaved off their hair to get rid of lice. Mao started a relationship with her.

Lily struck up a friendship with a visiting American writer, Agnes Smedley, who was an outspoken radical feminist. Smedley had worked for the Comintern, but was something of a loose cannon, and Moscow had sent instructions “to isolate her.” Even so, and although she found that Mao had a “sinister quality,” both “feminine” and “physically repulsive,” Mao cultivated her, and gave her a long interview, because she was American. Mao sent a copy of the interview to Snow, asking him to give it “wide publicity.”

While Lily Wu’s good looks stirred Mao’s lust, the much less good-looking Smedley caused a tornado by organizing square-dancing, accompanied by phonograph records. The dances were swamped. At first, Smedley observed, “Pride prevented him [Mao] from trying to dance. He had no rhythm in his being.” He basically just “walked the floor,” the women who danced with him noted. But he soon came to see the advantage of the dances as a form of exercise — and as a way to pick up women. Weekly dances were organized, some in the open air, others in a former church. Yenan went wild about dancing.

Together with other Long March women, Mao’s wife, Gui-yuan, at first refused to attend. According to Snow, “The close embrace of bodies involved seemed positively indecent to the old guard.” Jealousy seems to have played a big — if unavowed — role. Also repressed was their secret fondness for this pleasure: Gui-yuan later came to love dancing and was good at it.

She found Mao’s womanizing intolerable. One night in June, Smedley heard Gui-yuan screaming from the adjacent cave, where Lily lived. “Son of a pig, turtle’s egg, whoremongering no-good! How dare you sneak in here to sleep with the little bourgeois bitch!” Smedley went next door and found Gui-yuan lashing out at Mao with a flashlight, while his bodyguard looked on. Mao’s protestations that he had only been talking to Lily cut no ice. Gui-yuan turned on Lily, scratching her face and pulling her hair, while Mao stood by.

Gui-yuan then rounded on Smedley. “Imperialist bitch!” she cried. “You who are the cause of it all, get out of here!” She hit Smedley, who hit her back. Gui-yuan was felled to her knees, and appealed to Mao: “What kind of man are you, what kind of husband and Communist? You let an imperialist whore beat me before your very eyes!” When Mao told his bodyguard to lift her up, Gui-yuan tripped the bodyguard and knocked him down, and in the end it took three bodyguards to carry her off, trailed by a silent Mao.

Smedley was soon sent packing. Lily was not simply banished from Yenan, but written out of Chinese Communist sources, and disappeared off the map forever.

Mao conducted other flirtations, including one with the writer Ding Ling. Though boyish and stout and not exactly a beauty, she had talent and character. Mao sent her a very complimentary poem which included the lines: “To what do I compare your slender pen? Three thousand Mausers and best men.” She recalled in later years how she often visited Mao. One day he half-jokingly compared Yenan to a small imperial court, and started writing down his colleagues’ names under the various imperial titles, which she shouted out to him. “After we finished this, he suddenly said to me: ‘Ding Ling, we have got the Hundred Civil and Military Courtiers sorted out. Now that we are a royal court, no matter how small, we’ve got to have the imperial concubines in Three Palaces and Six Courtyards! Come on, give me some names, and I will bestow titles on them.’ ”

For Gui-yuan, Mao’s flagrant womanizing was the last straw. Over their marriage of nearly ten years, she had had to live with her husband’s heartlessness. She was particularly hurt by his callousness towards her painful pregnancies and childbirth — including one on the Long March — and by his crack that she gave birth to babies “as easily as a hen dropping eggs.” And she was bitter that although he was indifferent to children, and had not cared when four of theirs had died or been abandoned, he repeatedly made her pregnant. Their fifth child, a daughter called Chiao-chiao, was born in 1936 in Baoan, where conditions were appalling, with scorpions and rats running all over the place. A year later, Gui-yuan was pregnant again, which plunged her into depression. Repeated child-bearing in harsh circumstances had severely damaged her health, without the compensation of family life. Now, on top of this, her husband was openly sleeping with other women.

After the Communists settled in Yenan, some senior Reds who had been wounded were able to go to Russia for treatment. Ostensibly to get rid of the painful shrapnel still lodged in her body, Gui-yuan left for Russia in early October 1937. Their one-year-old daughter remained in Yenan.

Gui-yuan reached Moscow in the depths of winter. She and the other new arrivals were immediately warned by fellow Chinese there not to get in touch with anyone they had known previously. A great purge was sweeping Soviet Russia, and many Chinese were being arrested. It was in this freezing world of isolation and fear that she gave birth to a boy, to whom she gave the Russian name Lyova. He died of pneumonia after only six months, and Gui-yuan sank into inconsolable grief. For days she sat on a bench facing the tiny mound where he was buried in the back garden, murmuring his name, weeping.

There was no warmth from her husband. When the baby was born, she had written to Mao to say that the boy looked just like him. Mao did not reply. No word either for his son’s death. Then, in summer 1939, nearly two years after they had parted, Gui-yuan learned by chance that Mao had remarried. She and a group of non-Russian-speaking Chinese met regularly to have items from the Soviet press read out to them in Chinese. On this occasion, the translator was reading an article by a famous Russian film-maker, Roman Karmen, about meeting Mao. Karmen mentioned that Mao and “his wife” had seen him off outside their cave in moonlight. The phrase “Mao’s wife,” so casually mentioned, set Gui-yuan’s stomach churning. In the following days, people who shared a room with her said she was tossing and turning all night. She was already suffering from severe insomnia. Now she came to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Her condition worsened further when she received a brief letter from Mao. It was dry stuff: hope you will study hard and make progress politically. In one lapidary sentence Mao announced the dissolution of their marriage: From now on, we are only comrades.

Because he had remarried, Mao did not want Gui-yuan back in China. When the friends with whom she had traveled to Russia were returning to China in 1939, a cable from Yenan specifically ordered her to stay behind. As a result, the infant daughter she had left in Yenan spent her first few years as a virtual orphan. Chiao-chiao had had to live as a boarder in the elite’s nursery. When the other children were taken home by their parents at the end of the day, nobody came for her. Later in life she recalled that there was also a boy who always stayed behind. He would cry and shout: “I want Papa! I want Mama! I want Home!” Chiao-chiao had no idea what these words meant. As a grown-up, she told a friend, quietly but not without an edge: “In those days, I was an ‘orphan’ who was not exactly an orphan!”

When she was four, Chiao-chiao was taken to Russia to join her mother. Gui-yuan hugged her daughter long and hard when they were reunited, in streams of tears, which made Chiao-chiao extremely happy. She was also fascinated by her mother’s permed hair, skirts, and leather shoes with heels, all very different from the women in Yenan, who wore baggy pants and un-smart cotton shoes, attire that even those who came to Yenan from Nationalist cities had to adopt. But Gui-yuan was already crushed by poor health, the result of frequent pregnancies, injuries suffered during the Long March, and painful memories of her dead and abandoned children, as well as years of grinding loneliness. The horrors she had experienced in the revolution may also have haunted her mind. Soon she had a breakdown, and the brunt of her rage was borne by her daughter; other children often heard Chiao-chiao screaming as her mother beat her. Gui-yuan was put in a mental institution, howling as she was torn away from her room and bundled into a car. Her terrified seven-year-old daughter ran away and hid in the woods, and grew into an introverted and silent girl.

IN SUMMER 1937, before Gui-yuan left for Russia, Mao had spotted a young actress called Jiang Qing, who was to become his fourth wife. Jiang Qing cut a stylish figure even in Communist garb, her belt tightly cinching her svelte waist, and her rakishly tilted army cap exposing waves of shining black hair. She exuded femininity and sexiness. She had a soft and pliant posture and a very sweet — to some an affected — voice.

Born in 1914, Jiang Qing was the daughter of a concubine to an alcoholic inn-owner. Her mother let her grow up willful, even allowing her to unbind her feet, after the bones had been broken when she was six. Jiang Qing was tough, and in the frequent fights between her parents she would help her mother by clinging to her father’s legs and biting his arms. In one of these fights she lost part of a front tooth. Her fellow pupils recalled her as a bully, and she was expelled from school at the age of twelve after she spat at a teacher. She ran away from home at fourteen to join a traveling opera troupe, fetching up in Shanghai, where she made her name as an actress. But acting was a precarious career, and in summer 1937, out of work and unable to stand her lover’s seven-year-old son, she came to Yenan, which also appealed to her radical chic side.

She knew how to get herself noticed, sitting in the front row at Mao’s lectures, and asking wide-eyed questions. One day, Mao came to a Peking opera — a genre he loved — in which she was starring. Afterwards, he went backstage and put his coat around her shoulders. Next day she went to Mao’s place to return the coat, and stayed the night.

The couple began to appear in public together. This caused a scandal, as she was a woman with a past. She had already been married to, or lived with, four men, and had left a trail in the Shanghai gossip columns. Her stormy relationship with one of her husbands had provided fodder for the tabloids, especially after he tried to commit suicide by gulping down a bottle of surgical spirit with crushed match heads in it.

If cosmopolitan Shanghai found her difficult to stomach, puritanical Yenan positively gagged. On top of that, there was also tremendous sympathy for the woman she supplanted. One of Gui-yuan’s former Long March companions recalled: “The students in my college were all upset. Some wrote to Mao openly, some wrote secretly … I wrote three letters. They went roughly like this: Chairman Mao, we hope you won’t marry Jiang Qing. [Gui-yuan] is in very poor health, and you have had five or six children together … Jiang Qing’s reputation is pretty bad.”

For the Party, there was a more serious concern. Jiang Qing had once been imprisoned by the Nationalists as a Communist suspect, and had got out by signing a recantation — an act that the Party considered as “betrayal.” Moreover, there were allegations that she had entertained her jailers by being their dinner — and even their bed — companion. Underground organizations in Shanghai and other areas wired Yenan with formal complaints that she was “unsuitable to marry Chairman Mao.” Nominal Party chief Lo Fu wrote to Mao with his own objections and those of many others. When Mao received the letter, he tore it up on the spot and announced to the messenger: “I will get married tomorrow. Everyone else can mind their own business!” Next day he gave a “wedding” banquet to two dozen of Yenan’s elite, to which Lo Fu was not invited.

Mao got security chief Kang Sheng to vouch for Jiang Qing. While working in Russia, Kang had been the escort for Mao’s sons to Moscow, and for Chiang Kai-shek’s son on his way out of Russia. He had come to Yenan in November 1937, and quickly attached himself to Mao, who made him the head of his KGB. In this world of yellow earth, Kang stood out as he was often dressed completely in black, from head (black cap) to toe (unusual leather riding boots). His horse was black, and he was frequently seen cuddling a black dog, which was about the only pet around. Although Kang had proof that Jiang Qing’s conduct while in prison had been dubious, he provided Mao with an official verdict which cleared her by saying that “her past is no problem politically.” In fact, Mao knew that the charges were true, as he acknowledged near his death. But he did not care. He wanted her.

Mrs. Mao number 4 was to become the notorious Mme Mao.

Before Ching-kuo left Russia, he was worked on by Stalin in person, as well as being subjected to a blitz of blandishments and threats by Dimitrov. Ching-kuo played along, cabling Dimitrov en route that: “All your instructions will be fulfillled.” When he reached Vladivostok he was taken to the KGB office, where he performed his last formal act of obeisance to Moscow, promising: “I will strictly follow Party discipline.”

19. RED MOLE TRIGGERS CHINA — JAPAN WAR (1937–38 AGE 43–44)

ON 7 JULY 1937, fighting broke out between Chinese and Japanese troops at a place just outside Peking called the Marco Polo Bridge. By the end of the month the Japanese had occupied the two main cities in northern China, Peking and Tianjin. Chiang did not declare war. He did not want a full-scale war — not yet, anyway. And neither did the Japanese.

At this point Japan did not aim to extend the fighting beyond northern China. Yet, within a matter of weeks, all-out war had broken out 1,000 km to the south, in Shanghai, a place where neither Chiang nor Japan wished, or planned, to have a war. Japan had only some 3,000 marines stationed near Shanghai, under the 1932 truce agreement. Tokyo’s plan until mid-August remained: “Army to North China only.” It added specifically: “There is no need to send the Army to Shanghai.”

The well-informed New York Times correspondent H. Abend wrote afterwards:

It was a commonplace … to declare that the Japanese attacked Shanghai. Nothing was further from their intentions or from the truth. The Japanese did not want and did not expect hostilities in the Yangtse Valley. They … had so small a force there even as late as August 13th … that they were nearly pushed into the river on the 18th and 19th.

ABEND REALIZED that there were “clever plans to upset the Japanese scheme for confining the hostilities entirely to North China.” He was right about there being “clever plans”—he was only wrong about one thing: the plans were not Chiang’s (as Abend thought), but almost certainly Stalin’s.

Japan’s swift occupation of northern China in July posed a very direct danger to Stalin. Tokyo’s huge armies were now in a position to turn north and attack Russia anywhere along a border many thousands of kilometers long. The year before, Stalin had publicly identified Japan as the principal menace. Now, we believe, he activated a long-term Communist agent in the heart of the Nationalist army, and detonated a full-scale war in Shanghai, which drew the Japanese inextricably into the vast heartland of China — and away from Russia.

The “sleeper” now wakened was a general called Zhang Zhi-zhong (whom we shall refer to as ZZZ), commander of the Shanghai — Nanjing garrison. In 1925 he had been a teacher at Whampoa, the Russian-funded and Russian-staffed military academy near Canton. From the day of its founding, Moscow made a determined effort to plant high-level agents in the Nationalist military. In his memoirs, ZZZ acknowledged that: “In summer 1925 I was completely in sympathy with the Communist Party, and … was called ‘red teacher,’ ‘red regiment commander’ … I wanted to join the CCP, and told Mr. Chou En-lai.” Chou told him to stay in the Nationalists and collaborate “covertly” with the CCP. During the mid-1930s, ZZZ kept in close contact with the Soviet embassy.

At the time of the Marco Polo Bridge clash, ZZZ held the pivotal job of chief of the Shanghai — Nanjing garrison. He tried to talk Chiang into launching a “first strike” against Japan — not in northern China, where the fighting was, but 1,000 kilometers to the south, in Shanghai, where the small Japanese garrison was not involved in any military action at this stage. Chiang did not reply to this proposal, even though ZZZ repeated it many times. Shanghai was the industrial and financial heart of China, an international metropolis, and Chiang did not want to see it turned into a battleground. Moreover, it was very close to his capital, Nanjing. He had even transferred troops and artillery away from the Shanghai area, to give Japan no excuse for war there.

At the end of July, right after the Japanese occupied Peking and Tianjin, ZZZ cabled Chiang again, arguing strongly for “taking the initiative” to start a war. After ZZZ said he would only do so if the Japanese showed unmistakable signs of attacking Shanghai, Chiang gave his conditional consent, stressing: “You must wait for orders about when this should happen.”

But on 9 August, at Shanghai airport, an army unit hand-picked by ZZZ killed a Japanese marine lieutenant and a private. A Chinese prisoner under sentence of death was then dressed in Chinese uniform and shot dead at the airport gate, to make it seem that the Japanese had fired first. The Japanese gave every sign of wishing to defuse the incident, but ZZZ still bombarded Chiang with requests to launch an offensive, which Chiang vetoed. On the morning of the 13th, the Generalissimo told ZZZ not to launch a war “on impulse,” but to “study and discuss” all the angles again, and then submit his plan. ZZZ pressed the next day: “This army is determined to start the offensive against the enemy at 5:00 PM today. Here is the plan …” On the 14th, Chinese planes bombed the Japanese flagship Izumo, as well as troops and navy planes on the ground, and ZZZ ordered a general offensive. But Chiang stopped him: “You must not attack this evening. Wait for order.”

When no order arrived, ZZZ outflanked Chiang by issuing a press release next day, claiming, falsely, that Japanese warships had shelled Shanghai and that Japanese troops had started attacking the Chinese. With anti-Japanese feeling running high, Chiang was put on the spot. The following day, 16 August, he finally gave the order: “General assault for dawn tomorrow.”

But after one day’s fighting, Chiang ordered a halt, on the 18th. ZZZ simply ignored the order and expanded his offensives. All-out war became unstoppable as large Japanese reinforcements began to arrive on 22 August.

The Japanese inflicted tremendous casualties. In Shanghai, 73 of China’s 180 divisions — and the best one-third — over 400,000 men, were thrown in, and all but wiped out. The conflict here consumed virtually all of China’s nascent air force (which Chiang so treasured that he had not sent a single plane to the northern front), and the main warships. It significantly weakened the military force Chiang had been painstakingly building up since the early 1930s. The Japanese suffered much fewer, though still heavy, casualties: about 40,000.

Once Chiang was forced into all-out war, Stalin moved with alacrity to bolster Chiang’s capability to sustain a war. He signed a non-aggression treaty with Nanjing on 21 August, and started to supply Chiang with weapons. China could not manufacture any weapons except rifles. Stalin advanced Chiang US$250 million for arms purchases from Russia, which included some 1,000 planes, plus tanks and artillery, and committed a sizable Soviet air force contingent. Moscow sent hundreds of military advisers, headed for a time by the Chinese-speaking General Vasili Chuikov, later of Stalingrad fame. For the next four years, Russia was not only China’s main supplier of arms, but virtually its only source of heavy weapons, artillery and planes.

Moscow was exhilarated by the turn of events, as the Soviet foreign minister, Maksim Litvinov, admitted to French vice-premier Léon Blum. According to Blum, Litvinov told him that “he [Litvinov] and the Soviet Union were perfectly delighted that Japan had attacked China [adding] that the Soviet Union hoped that war between China and Japan would continue just as long as possible …” Both of the Russians who dealt with ZZZ, the military attaché Lepin and Ambassador Bogomolov, were immediately recalled and executed.

ZZZ was quickly forced to resign, in September, by an angry, frustrated and undoubtedly suspicious Chiang. But the Generalissimo continued to employ him. When the Nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949, ZZZ stayed with the Communists, as did super-mole Shao Li-tzu.

The outbreak of full-scale war between Japan and China brought Mao immediate benefits. Chiang Kai-shek finally acceded to the Communists’ key demand, which he had till now refused to consider — that the Red Army could keep its autonomy. Mao thus kept control of his own army, even though it was supposed to be part of the armed forces of the central government. Though Chiang was supreme commander of the Chinese army, he could not give orders to the Red Army, and had to couch his commands in the form of “requests.” In addition, the CCP was now, in effect, legitimized. Communist prisoners were released and the CCP was allowed to open offices in key cities, and to publish its own papers in Nationalist areas.

And yet this was just the beginning of Mao’s gains from the Sino-Japanese War, which lasted eight years and took some 20 million Chinese lives. It ended up weakening Chiang’s state enormously, and enabling Mao to emerge in possession of a giant army of 1.3 million. At the beginning of the war, the ratio of Chiang’s army to Mao’s was 60:1; at the end, it was 3:1.

HAVING MASTERMINDED the detonation of all-out war between China and Japan, Stalin ordered the Chinese Red Army to get actively involved, telling the CCP in no uncertain terms that it must cooperate properly with the Nationalists, and not do anything to give Chiang the slightest excuse not to fight Japan.

At this time, the Chinese Red Army had some 60,000 regular troops. Of these, 46,000 were in the northwest Red region, with Yenan as its capital. These were now renamed “the 8th Route Army” (8RA), led by Zhu De, with Peng De-huai as his deputy. Ten thousand were in the Eastern Yangtze valley in the heartland of China. These were guerrillas who had been left behind by the Long March, and they now became the “New 4th Army” (N4A). Xiang Ying, the head of the stay-behinds (and Mao’s old nemesis, who had argued vigorously against Mao being taken along on the Long March), became the head of the N4A.

From late August, the three divisions that made up the 8RA began to cross the Yellow River towards the front, which lay several hundred kilometers to the east, in Shanxi province. Red Army commanders as well as soldiers were very keen to fight the Japanese. So were most of the CCP leaders.

But not Mao. Mao did not regard the Sino-Japanese War as a conflict in which all Chinese would fight together against Japan. He did not see himself as on the same side as Chiang at all. Years later, he was to say to his inner circle that he had regarded the war as a three-sided affair. “Chiang, Japan and us — Three Kingdoms,” he said, evoking the period in Chinese history known as the Three Warring Kingdoms. The war was to him an opportunity to have Chiang destroyed by the Japanese. In later years he more than once thanked the Japanese for “lending a big hand.” When after the war some Japanese visitors apologized to him for Japan having invaded China, he told them: “I would rather thank the Japanese warlords.” Without them occupying much of China, “we would still be in the mountains today.” He meant every word.

Mao had no strategy to drive the Japanese out of China without Chiang. Nor could he dream that the CCP could cope with the Japanese occupying army once Chiang was defeated. All his hopes hinged on Stalin. Mao had made his calculation clear in an interview with Edgar Snow in 1936, saying that Soviet Russia

cannot ignore events in the Far East. It cannot remain passive. Will it complacently watch Japan conquer all China and make of it a strategic base from which to attack the USSR? Or will it help the Chinese people …? We think Russia will choose the latter course.

Mao’s basic plan for the Sino-Japanese War, therefore, was to preserve his forces and expand the sphere of the Chinese Reds, while waiting for Stalin to act. So when the Japanese pushed deeper into the interior from northern China as well as from the Shanghai area, Mao got Chiang to agree that the Red Army would not be put into any battles, and would operate only as auxiliaries to government troops. Mao did not want the Red Army to fight the invaders at all. He ordered Red commanders to wait for Japanese troops to defeat the Nationalists, and then, as the Japanese swept on, to seize territories behind the Japanese lines. The Japanese could not garrison the vast areas of China they conquered — which were eventually much larger than Japan itself. They could only control the railways and the big cities, leaving the smaller towns and the countryside up for grabs. Mao also ordered his men to round up defeated Nationalist troops in order to expand the Red ranks. His plan was to ride on the coat-tails of the Japanese to expand Red territory.

He bombarded his military commanders with telegrams such as: “Focus on creating base areas … Not on fighting battles …” And when the Japanese were sweeping across the province of Shanxi, he ordered: “Set up our territory in the whole of Shanxi province.” He said years later that his attitude had been: “The more land Japan took, the better.”

Mao’s approach met with resistance from his own commanders, who were keen to fight the Japanese. On 25 September the Red Army had its first engagement with the Japanese, when a unit under Lin Biao ambushed the tail end of a Japanese transport convoy at the pass of Pingxingguan, in northeast Shanxi, near the Great Wall. Although this was a minor clash — and against a non-combat unit, which, according to Lin, was mainly asleep — it was the first time Communists had killed any Japanese (outside Manchuria). If Mao had had his way, this fight would not have happened at all. According to a report Lin Biao wrote in 1941 in Russia (where he was receiving treatment for bullet wounds), Mao had repeatedly refused to authorize the action: “When battles started between the Japanese army and the Nationalist army, I more than once asked the CC [Central Committee: i.e., Mao] for a decision to organise a powerful strike against the Japanese. I never received an answer, and I ended up giving battle near Pingxingguan on my own initiative.”

Mao was furious about Pingxingguan. This fighting, he said, was “helping Chiang Kai-shek,” and had done nothing to advance his goal — which was to establish Red territory. But for propaganda purposes, Mao had Pingxingguan inflated out of all proportion in an effort to demonstrate that the CCP was more committed to fighting the Japanese than the Nationalists were. One reason the Communists kept citing it was because it was, literally, the only “battle” they had with the Japanese for years, one that killed a couple of hundred Japanese at the very most.

The Red Army had a few other small successes, as minor players in collaboration with Nationalist troops. But all the time, Mao was urging them to stop fighting the Japanese and concentrate on taking over territory. By mid-November, the first new Communist base in the Japanese rear was formed, near Peking, called Jinchaji, with a population of some 12 million, making it many times larger than the Yenan base. This and other huge Red territories “created the condition for our victory” in conquering China, Mao told a Japanese visitor years later.

STALIN, HOWEVER, wanted the Chinese Reds to fight Japan, and to get his policy enforced he flew his most loyal Chinese acolyte to Yenan in a special plane in November 1937. This was Wang Ming, who had been working for years in the Comintern as the CCP representative. Just before he left, Stalin called him in and laid down the line: “The main thing now is the war [i.e., to fight Japan] … when that is over we will face the question of how to fight each other [i.e., Reds fighting Chiang].”

Most CCP leaders agreed with Stalin’s line. When the Politburo met in December for the first time after Wang Ming’s return, Wang Ming became the champion of the “fight Japan first” policy. The Politburo decided that the Red Army must take orders from the national military HQ, of which Chiang was the head and the CCP a part. Mao argued against this. But faced with a clear order from Stalin, he had to accept.

Mao’s colleagues showed their disapproval of his agenda by making a decision that would oust Mao from his No. 1 position. Moscow had told the CCP to convene a congress, which was long overdue (the last had been in 1928). The person the Politburo chose to deliver the political report at the congress, which by strict Communist protocol devolved on the Party No. 1, was not Mao but Wang Ming. This was the Party leadership saying they wanted Wang Ming to be the future chief.

Although Mao was de facto leader of the Party, and was recognized by Moscow as such, his position was not formalized, most unusually for the ritual-obsessed Communist world. The Party chief was still nominally Lo Fu. Nor did Mao command the kind of unchallengeable awe that Stalin did.

Mao had also lost control of the core decision-making group, the Secretariat. For the first time since the break with the Nationalists in 1927, all of its nine members had come together in one place, and five of them did not support Mao. The leader of the majority opposition was Wang Ming. Xiang Ying, head of the N4A, had long been an outspoken opponent of Mao. Chang Kuo-tao, the man Mao had so massively sabotaged on the Long March, hated Mao. And Chou En-lai and Po Ku both backed Wang Ming. Chou was in favor of fighting Japan actively, and gladly went along with the majority. Mao was in the minority.

Wang Ming had Moscow’s authority, and the credentials of having been the Party’s representative there, of having met Stalin, and of having hobnobbed with international Communist leaders. Fluent in Russian, and wise to the Kremlin’s ways, he was also ambitious and ruthless. During the great purge in Russia, he had sent many Chinese Communists to prison or death. Though baby-faced, short and fleshy, this super-confident 33-year-old posed an acute threat to Mao.

Mao would often hark back with great bitterness to that December 1937 when Wang Ming prevailed. This stands in stark contrast to the fact that not once in his long life did he mention another event that took place at exactly the same time — a huge massacre in Nanjing, in which an estimated up to 300,00 °Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were slaughtered by the Japanese. Mao never made any comment, then or later, about this, the single biggest human tragedy of the Sino-Japanese War for his fellow countrymen.

After Nanjing fell on 13 December, Chiang Kai-shek established his temporary capital farther inland, at Wuhan on the Yangtze. Wang Ming went there as CCP liaison on 18 December, with Chou and Po Ku as his deputies. They formed a good working relationship with Chiang. Red Army commanders were going there too, to liaise with the Nationalists. Mao was marginalized in Yenan. He referred resentfully to his peripheral position as “house-sitting,” although this complaint masked a critical reality: he used this time and the fact that the others were deeply involved in the war, to build up Yenan as his fiefdom.

From Yenan Mao waged an unrelenting struggle to prevent the Red Army from acting on the plans made in the national HQ headed by Chiang. When Zhu De wired on 19 February 1938 to say that the 8RA HQ was moving east in line with the general plan, Mao tried to turn the army back, by claiming that the Japanese were about to attack Yenan. In fact, Japan never attempted to attack Yenan, apart from occasional bombing.

Zhu declined to turn back, saying that Mao was probably falling for a ruse whose purpose was precisely to entice the 8RA away from the front. Mao persisted, showering Zhu with telegrams ordering him and Peng back to Yenan: “In particular, you two must return.” Zhu and Peng replied with a definitive “No” on 7 March and continued east with their troops.

To stop Mao from constantly issuing orders that countermanded agreed strategy, the Politburo met again at the end of February. Wang Ming had demanded the meeting for this purpose — and to sort out another urgent matter. In January, under Mao’s aegis and without Chiang Kai-shek’s consent, the new Red territory of Jinchaji had been publicly proclaimed as a Red base. This had triggered off a wave of anti-communism in the country, with many asking: “What are we fighting the Japanese for? After Japan is defeated all we will get is a Communist takeover!” Wang Ming and his group in Wuhan were extremely unhappy about this in-your-face act by Mao.

Once again the majority of the Politburo sided with Wang Ming (and confirmed that he would deliver the political report at the forthcoming Party congress). The summary of the meeting, written by Wang Ming, said that the Red Army must be subject to “the supreme commander,” i.e., Chiang Kai-shek, with “completely unified command … unified discipline, unified war plans and unified operations.” Any new Red bases “must obtain the consent and authorisation of … the Nationalist government beforehand.” Wang Ming also said, most ominously for Mao, that: “Today, only the Japanese Fascists … and their running-dogs … and the Trotskyists are attempting to overthrow the Nationalists …”

These were Moscow’s words, and the charge was potentially deadly. So Mao pretended that he accepted the “fight Japan first” policy. He told Red commanders that they could take orders from the national HQ, and promised not to “interfere” in the future.

Mao was so nervous that he had been taking steps to prevent Moscow learning his real position. At the end of the December 1937 Politburo meeting, he had had all the participants’ notes confiscated under the pretense of “safe-keeping,” so that no one could cite him if they decided to report him. When a new envoy was sent to Moscow, Mao engineered for an ally of his, Ren Bi-shi, to get the job. Ren told the Russians that Mao’s policy was no different from Moscow’s.

In late January 1938 an emissary from the Soviet General Staff, V. V. Andrianov, had secretly visited Yenan — the highest-ranking Russian ever to do so. He had brought the huge sum of US$3 million (equivalent to roughly US$40 million today) for the specific purpose of building up the Red Army to fight the Japanese. Stalin had said he wanted the Chinese Red Army to have “not three but thirty divisions.” Moscow was ready to bankroll this huge expansion — for fighting Japan.

Andrianov asked Mao what his plans were for the war. Mao gave him a detailed, but false, account, saying that he intended to concentrate large contingents to strike the Japanese through “mobile warfare,” and claiming that the Nationalists were spurning his efforts to cooperate with them. He even tried to demonstrate his enthusiasm by suggesting that the Japanese — whom he portrayed as ineffective and suffering from low morale — were an easier foe to fight than the Nationalists.

This was a most precarious time for Mao. He could not have failed to register that Moscow had noticeably scaled down public praise of him in the previous year, and had criticized the CCP in a key text on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. His complicity in the kidnapping of Chiang was bound to make Stalin suspect him. Indeed, Stalin had been nursing suspicions that Mao might be “a Japanese agent.” Comintern officials who had had dealings with Mao were arrested and interrogated under torture. Comintern intelligence chief Osip Piatnitsky was one of them,^† and in April 1938, he named Mao as a conspirator in an alleged “Bukharin group.” Bukharin, the former head of the Comintern, was alleged to have spied for Japan.

The dossier on Mao included a denunciation of him as “the leader of Trotskyism in the inmost depths of the CCP”—a doubly menacing accusation, as Chinese Trotskyists were deemed to be Japanese spies. Moscow’s former top agent in China, Boris Melnikov, was accused of having recruited Mao and then gone over to the Japanese, along with other top CCP leaders. Stalin had Melnikov brought to the Kremlin for a face-to-face debriefing, and Melnikov’s execution was delayed for eight months while he was grilled about the CCP. It was during this period that a huge number of former Soviet agents in China were executed on the charge of being Japanese spies. Mao’s fate was in the balance.

From December 1937 to the end of 1939 more than 2,000 Russian pilots flew combat missions, destroying about 1,000 Japanese planes, and even bombing Japanese-occupied Taiwan.

Confirmed by Lin Biao himself in his report for the Russians of February 1941. The CCP “to this day exploits this battle for agitational [propaganda] purposes. In all our documents this is the only important battle cited …”

The other three members of the Secretariat were Lo Fu, Chen Yun and Kang Sheng.

When Wang Ming was still in Moscow, he told the Comintern that Mao “wired me repeatedly that they need money terribly [and] asked that you continue to send money every month.”

^†Piatnitsky was arrested on 7 July 1937, the day the Marco Polo Bridge incident occurred, leading to Japan’s attack on northern China and threat to Russia. The first recorded interrogation of him is dated 11 November 1937; that same day Stalin saw Wang Ming before the latter left for Yenan to press the CCP and Mao to fight Japan. These were unmistakable indications that the arrest of Piatnitsky had to do with the war with Japan, the CCP — and Mao.

20. FIGHT RIVALS AND CHIANG — NOT JAPAN (1937–40 AGE 43–46)

ONE MAN who sought to exploit Mao’s vulnerability was Chang Kuo-tao. He had met up with Mao in June 1935 during the Long March, with an army 80,000-strong in contrast to Mao’s battered 10,000. He also had solid credentials to be the leader of the CCP. Over the next few months, however, Mao had methodically sabotaged his army, and monopolized the route north to link up with the Russians, leaving Kuo-tao to languish on the Tibetan border. By the time Kuo-tao reached Party HQin northern Shaanxi in October 1936, his army had been halved in strength and he had become very much the junior partner. Even so, Mao was bent on further weakening Kuo-tao, because his army was still twice the size of Mao’s, and he was still a potential rival.

That month, October 1936, when Mao dispatched the Red Army to try to open the way to the Russian arms supplies near the Outer Mongolia border, he designated Kuo-tao’s combat-hardened units to break through the Nationalist force blocking the route. When this operation failed, 21,800 of Kuo-tao’s troops — half of his remaining men — were cut off on the far side of the Yellow River. Moscow then floated the idea that the CCP might collect arms in another Soviet-controlled region, Xinjiang. The mission was hopeless, given that it involved crossing more than 1,500 kilometers, through uninhabited desert and territory held by a fierce anti-Communist Muslim army. But Mao jumped at this idea and assigned Kuo-tao’s stranded force to this doomed mission. The force was named the Western Contingent.

Mao managed to make the journey even more futile by issuing a stream of contradictory orders that drove the Contingent from one hellish locale to another, continually plunging it into pitched battles. Its commander recorded bitterly that the tasks assigned him by Yenan were “elusive and changeable.” When the Contingent cabled early in February 1937 from the middle of the desert that it could not hold out much longer, nor go on, and asked for permission to come to Yenan, Mao ordered it to hold on where it was, telling it to “fight to the last person and the last drop of blood.”

By mid-March the Contingent, once the backbone of Kuo-tao’s army, had been all but killed off. Those captured met horrible deaths. After one climactic battle in western Gansu, more than 1,000 were buried alive. Heart-rending photos were taken of a large group of unsuspecting prisoners before they were slaughtered. The 2,000 women were raped, some tortured and killed, others sold in the local slave markets. Of the original 21,800 men and women, only around 400 eventually made it to Xinjiang at the end of April, more dead than alive.

The extermination of this force allowed Mao to slam the lid on the coffin of Kuo-tao. Mao turned Kuo-tao, who was in Yenan, into the scapegoat, asserting that the Contingent had been following “the Chang Kuo-tao line.” But Moscow refused to support Mao’s attempt to get Kuo-tao kicked out of the Politburo. Still, Kuo-tao was denounced in front of his own officers.

Mao not only ended Kuo-tao’s political prospects, he ended the lives of the few of the Western Contingent who eventually made it to Yenan. A local official described what happened:

When they were chased into our [area], we first of all gave them a welcome party and took over their arms. Then we said to them: “Comrades, you have been through a lot. You are transferred to the rear to have a good rest.” We took them in batches into the valleys, and buried all these grandsons of turtles [i.e., bastards] alive.

It was such fun burying them. At first, we said to them with smiles: “Comrades, dig the pits well, we want to bury Nationalist troops alive.” They really worked hard, one spade after another, wiping sweat from their faces … After they finished, we shoved them and kicked them all in. At first, they thought we were joking. But when we began to shovel earth in, they started shouting: “Comrades, we are not Nationalist troops!” We cursed: “Sons of bitches. We don’t care whether you are Nationalist troops or not. We want you to die, and you die …”

At this point, the bragger was challenged: “I absolutely refuse to believe this was the order of the Party.”

But the man went on: “What! It was our regimental commander who ordered us to do this. And he said it was the order of Comrade Gao Gang [local Communist leader], who of course was carrying out the order of Chairman Mao. We only recognise Chairman Mao’s authority. Whatever Chairman Mao asks us to do, we do.”

Kuo-tao himself was subjected to multiple “torments … masterminded by Mao,” he later wrote. He was thrown out of his house by Mao’s secretary so that Mao could take it over, and his orderly was arrested. Mao even tormented Kuo-tao’s young son, who was cast as the leading Trotskyist Chang Mu-tao in a school play. Kuo-tao described arriving at the school to find “a group of people were ridiculing my son. Mao Tse-tung was also there, having fun. He cackled maliciously: ‘It fits perfectly to have Chang Kuo-tao’s son play the role of Chang Mu-tao.’ … I tore away the mask my son was wearing and led him away from the scene. I shouted in anger as I left: ‘Barbarians!.. Worse than beasts!’ ”

BY SPRING 1938, Kuo-tao was at the end of his tether. This was right at the moment when Mao’s own position was unusually weak, as he was out of line with Moscow’s orders to fight Japan. Kuo-tao spotted a chance to join hands with Wang Ming, who represented Moscow’s viewpoint. At the time, Wang Ming was in Wuhan, Chiang’s temporary capital, with Chou En-lai and Po Ku. On 4 April, in his capacity as chairman of the Red region, Kuo-tao left Yenan for a joint Nationalist — CCP ceremony at the tomb of the mythical Yellow Emperor, outside the base area. After the ceremony he drove off to Xian, and from there he went on to Wuhan to see Wang Ming and his colleagues.

This was the rarest of rare opportunities, with the majority of the core Party leadership, all in disagreement with Mao, out of Yenan at the same time, and thus out of Mao’s clutches. (Xiang Ying, Mao’s fiercest critic and the head of the N4A, was near Wuhan.) The content of Kuo-tao’s confabulations in Wuhan is one of the CCP’s most closely guarded secrets. Almost certainly, Kuo-tao argued for ousting Mao. Yenan later told Moscow that Kuo-tao had “tried to break the unity of the Party” when he was in Wuhan. But he left empty-handed, probably because the Wuhan trio did not believe that Moscow would stand for dumping Mao. Whereas Kuo-tao was desperate, Wang Ming was at the peak of his confidence, and it may have been hard for him to appreciate that Mao’s apparent acceptance of majority decisions masked a ferocious determination to claw his way back into control.

The talks went on for about a week. When Kuo-tao realized that he was getting nowhere, he decided to leave the Party for the Nationalists, which he did on 17 April. The Wuhan trio let him go. He then wrote to his wife, whom he had left behind in Yenan, pregnant, asking her to join him, with their twelve-year-old son. Mao stalled for two months, to make sure that Kuo-tao did no drastic damage, and then allowed them to leave.

These words of Mao’s reveal why he maneuvered so relentlessly to avoid entering Sichuan after the Zunyi Conference. They also show that he was prepared to kill huge numbers of fellow-Communist troops for his own ends. When Kuo-tao’s wife came to Wuhan, Chou advised her to tell her husband “not to burn his bridges with the Party.” Kuo-tao took notice. He had once been the head of the CCP’s Military Department, in charge of planting high-level agents in the Nationalist military, but he never revealed a single name to the Nationalists. In fact, he did little for them, and they were disappointed with him. His thousand-page-plus autobiography conspicuously failed to spill many beans. A sign that he kept his mouth shut was that after he fled the Mainland on the eve of Mao’s conquest of China, one of his sons was allowed back to go to university in Canton in the mid-1950s. He outlived Mao and died in an old people’s home in Toronto, Canada, in 1979, aged eighty-two, having converted to Christianity the year before.

Kuo-tao’s defection to the Nationalists allowed Mao to discredit him in the eyes of his army; he was promptly expelled from the Party. Some of his old followers in Yenan were “extremely dissatisfied,” Nationalist intelligence chief Tai Li reported to Chiang Kai-shek. They met in secret, whereupon Mao’s forces “liquidated them all there and then. About 200 were buried alive.”

Moscow waited two months before endorsing the expulsion. During this time, something most crucial for Mao happened: Stalin brought the Comintern purge to an end. Piatnitsky and Melnikov, who had implicated Mao as a Japanese spy, were executed (on the same day), along with a host of others connected to China. Mao’s dossier remained on file, ready to be resuscitated when Stalin needed it again a decade later. But for now Mao was off the hook.

As soon as Mao learned that the Kremlin had approved the expulsion of Kuo-tao, and that he himself was in the clear, he turned to tackle Wang Ming.

AT THIS POINT Mao had a major ally in Moscow, his old fellow plotter on the Long March, Wang Jia-xiang, the Red Prof. Mao had pushed hard and bombarded Moscow with requests for the Red Prof to go to Russia, ostensibly for medical treatment, ever since radio contact with Moscow had been established in June 1936. The Red Prof arrived there in July 1937, and became the CCP’s representative once Wang Ming returned to China. Now, in June 1938, Mao cabled the Red Prof to return. He was in the position to perform a signal service for Mao. Before he left, he saw Comintern leader Dimitrov, and in a conversation about Party unity, Dimitrov said that the CCP needed to solve its problems “under the leadership headed by Mao Tse-tung.” Mao was to use this single expression to reverse his personal fortunes — and Party policy.

The Red Prof returned to Yenan in late August. Mao immediately had him summon Wang Ming and the others to a Central Committee plenum “to hear the Comintern’s instructions.” This was the first time the Central Committee had been convened since before the Long March, well over four years before. Wuhan, the temporary capital, was under fierce attack by the Japanese. Yet Mao recalled the field commanders and top men to Yenan, which was a backwater. Wang Ming objected, saying this was no time for the entire Party leadership to be absent from the nation’s capital, and suggested holding the meeting in Wuhan. “I’m not going anywhere!” Mao declared. The Red Prof cabled Wang Ming threateningly: “Obey the Centre, or else.”

Wang Ming came reluctantly, on 15 September. The Red Prof first addressed the Politburo, quoting the remark Dimitrov had made, upon which Mao said that he would deliver the political report at the plenum — thus re-establishing his position as No. 1. Wang Ming offered no resistance. When the plenum opened on the 29th in Yenan’s Franciscan cathedral, the Red Prof, seated beneath Lenin’s picture on the altar, repeated Dimitrov’s words to the larger audience. Thus was planted in the minds of the CCP high command the idea that Moscow had explicitly endorsed Mao as their leader.

As a reward to the Red Prof, Mao gave him a slew of key posts, including vice-chairman of the Military Council. Mao also found the 32-year-old bachelor a pretty and coquettish bride, a 23-year-old medical graduate whose father had been an old friend of Mao’s. So, having made nominal Party chief Lo Fu a happy man with a petite and vivacious spouse, Mao had spun the “red thread” around another useful heart, locking two vital allies to his belt. Mao enjoyed matchmaking, and was shrewd about the ways of the heart, particularly in sexually inhibited men.

Mao now set about discrediting Wang Ming. However, shattering Party unity was something Moscow had specifically vetoed — and Wang Ming could be expected to fight back if attacked to his face. So Mao resorted to his old trick of dragging the meeting out until Wang Ming and other key opponents had left before he set upon them.

Mao strung the plenum out for almost two months, making it the longest ever, even though it took place in the midst of a national crisis during which not only Wuhan but also the Nationalists’ last major port, Canton, fell to the Japanese. Communist bases behind Japanese lines were threatened as well. Urgent pleas came flying in—“Emergency situation here. Please could Peng De-huai return soonest …”—but Mao refused to release the military commanders until he had achieved his goals.

Chiang Kai-shek moved his capital to Chongqing, further inland, where he was convening a new National Assembly for 28 October which Wang Ming was due to attend. Mao made sure that his plenum was still in session when Wang Ming had to depart for Chongqing — the same ploy he had used in 1929 to lay his hands on Red Fujian.

In order to prolong things, Mao insisted that every Politburo member make two virtually identical speeches — one to the Politburo and one to the plenum. He himself stalled his Political Report for two weeks, during which time participants were kept hanging around. When he finally spoke he was massively long-winded, and what with his habit of sleeping in the morning, he took up no less than three days.

By the end of October, all Mao’s most powerful opponents — Chou, Xiang Ying, Po Ku and Wang Ming — had left town. Once they had gone, Mao launched an onslaught on them, and especially on Wang Ming, for “following Chiang Kai-shek’s orders,” and even for the bloody purges in the Red areas before the Long March, when Wang Ming was not even there.

With his opponents absent, Mao imposed his policy on the plenum: to expand Red bases aggressively, and wage war on Nationalist troops if necessary. This was the first time that Mao spelled out his real intentions. There were many Nationalist troops behind Japanese lines, and they were competing with the Communists for territory. Hitherto, the policy had been to avoid fighting them and make unity with Chiang the priority. Mao had expressed complete agreement while Wang Ming was present, called Chiang Kai-shek a “great leader,” committed himself to placing new Red bases under the central government, and promised to “aim every gun at the Japanese.” He even proclaimed: “The Chinese nation has stood up! The state of being bullied, insulted, invaded and oppressed for 100 years … is over.” These words are almost identical to those he used at the time of the founding of Communist China in 1949, when he said: “the Chinese have stood up.” The 1949 remark is much quoted as — and widely assumed to be — a first. In fact, it was not. Moreover, when Mao originally used the phrase, China, in his words, was “under Mr. Chiang’s leadership”!

With Wang Ming gone, Mao told the top men that the Generalissimo was their ultimate enemy, and that they must start now preparing to seize power from him. The Red Army must strike Nationalist troops who stood in the way of its expansion. This was a milestone order to the top echelon: Chiang remains your enemy No. 1. You can open fire on Chiang’s army.

A KEY SUPPORTER of this approach was the future president, Liu Shao-chi, who had been running the underground network in northern China. Liu had spent two long periods in Russia, had met Lenin in 1921, and had had an affair with one of Lenin’s closest friends, Larisa Reysner. A man of considerable far-sightedness, Liu shared Mao’s hard-nosed strategy for seizing power. Immediately after the plenum, Mao made him Party chief of a large area in east central China where the N4A was operating — and thus the boss over Xiang Ying and the N4A.

Mao also had the support of Peng De-huai, the deputy chief of the 8RA, who could see that civil war was inevitable if the Reds were to expand — or even to stay on at all in some places. Zhu De, the 8RA chief, went along. Mao had secured the support of the chiefs of all the Red forces for his policy.

As his strategy directly contravened Stalin’s instructions, Mao was afraid that the news might be leaked to Wang Ming, and through him to Moscow. So he ordered his speeches to be kept absolutely secret. To seal the mouths of his audience, Mao produced two cautionary “Resolutions on discipline,” which banned anyone from “revealing secrets” to “anyone else inside or outside the Party.” This meant that participants could not tell their colleagues, even those who had attended the early part of the plenum, that Mao had just ordered civil war against the Nationalists. And no one dared tell Wang Ming the full story about Mao’s attacks on him.

To weave a blanket of fear, Mao relied on the later infamous security chief Kang Sheng. In Russia, Kang had supervised the purges of hundreds of Chinese, many of whom were tortured, executed, or worked to death in the gulag. He had been Wang Ming’s deputy on the CCP delegation to the Comintern, and had followed him closely. When the two first arrived in Yenan, Kang had led the shouting of “Long live our Party’s genius leader comrade Wang Ming!” at the security apparatus’s training sessions. But Kang had quickly realized Mao was the winner, and switched allegiance. It was now that Kang vouched for Jiang Qing, enabling Mao to marry her, forming a further bond between him and Mao. Mao made him the head of the CCP’s KGB, even trusting him to select his personal guards.

It was to this closely controlled Yenan that Wang Ming was ordered to return after the National Assembly session in Chongqing. He was made head of the United Front Department, nominally an important post, but was soon reduced to a figurehead. An eyewitness recalled seeing him in the street, “his head bent, his steps heavy … buried in his own thoughts.” But Wang Ming was not openly denounced, as his link with Moscow was strong. So, for the average Party member, he was still one of the leaders — and popular. Many recalled him being “a good orator whose speeches were very lively and rousing. Young people liked him.” Mao was no orator. Wang Ming remained his unfinished business.

FROM 1939, after Mao ordered the Party to adopt an aggressive stance towards the Nationalists, large-scale engagements were fought behind Japanese lines between Communist and Nationalist forces over territory, in which the Communists usually came off best. By January 1940 the 8RA, under Zhu De and Peng, had grown to at least 240,000 (from 46,000 at the beginning of the war). And the N4A, operating under Liu Shao-chi near Shanghai and Nanjing, had tripled, to 30,000. A score of sizable bases sprang up in the Japanese rear. The base of Jinchaji alone, only some 80 km from Peking, expanded to control a population of 25 million. At this point, with the war more than two years old, when realism had replaced initial patriotic ardor, many Red leaders came to admire the brilliance of Mao’s cold vision. Peng De-huai described Mao in a speech in February 1940 as “a wise leader with political foresight, who can foresee developments and is good at dealing with them.” And it was in this period that Chou En-lai made a total conversion to Mao.

Mao had done well for the CCP. But he had to keep Stalin on board. For many months, he concealed the clashes with the Nationalists from Moscow. He only owned up when the fighting had grown conspicuous and serious in June 1939, and then he claimed that it was purely self-defensive, portraying the Nationalists as intent on wiping the Communists off the face of the earth.

Mao knew how to play to his audience in Moscow. In spring 1939, Stalin had sent his top documentary film-maker, Roman Karmen, to Yenan to film Mao. Mao left a book of Stalin’s open in his study when Karmen arrived and then posed for a long take holding a text by Stalin, with a picture of the author prominent on the front cover. He toasted Stalin, saying that the only place abroad he wanted to go was Moscow, to see Stalin. When he bade farewell to Karmen at the entrance to his cave, in the dark, he made a point of asking which way Moscow lay, sighing deeply and then falling into a long silence. “With what warmth Mao talks of comrade Stalin!” Karmen wrote.

Most crucially, Mao had his men in Moscow to bolster his position — and to denigrate his foes. He had made sure that the CCP’s envoys in Moscow were his allies — first, the Red Prof, then Ren Bi-shi. As he embarked on a course of action towards Chiang that was in defiance of Stalin’s orders, he sent a string of additional emissaries, starting with Lin Biao, who went to Russia at the end of 1938 for treatment for bullet wounds. Lin had been shot by Nationalist troops while he was wearing a captured Japanese coat, and was mistaken for a Japanese.

Lin took with him only documents that Mao wanted Moscow to see, so Stalin was kept in the dark about Mao’s machinations and real policies. Lin built Mao up as “the solid, decisive and principled leader of the CCP,” badmouthing Chou as a “swindler” and Zhu De (“the former gendarme”) as “not one of us.”

Lin was followed in June 1939 by Mao’s brother, Tse-min, ostensibly also for “health” reasons — although, as the Russians observed, he did not spend a single day in the hospital. Tse-min’s main task was to undermine Wang Ming, whom he called “a scoundrel,” denouncing him for, amongst other things, exaggerating the strength of the Chinese Red Army in the presence of Stalin — a potentially deadly accusation. Another aim of Mao’s was to have Wang Ming’s role downgraded at the forthcoming Party congress. Wang Ming was scheduled to deliver the second report, on organization. But Tse-min told Moscow that Wang Ming was not the right person, making the false allegation that he “had never run practical org[anisation]work.” Tse-min also threw mud at other foes of Mao, like Po Ku and Li Wei-han, an old Hunan Communist leader, both of whom he accused of “major crimes,” saying they should be kept out of all leading bodies. He likened Po Ku to “opportunists, Trotskyists and bandits.”

Mao’s third “extra” emissary, Chou En-lai, arrived just as the war in Europe started, checking into the Kremlin hospital on 14 September for an operation on his right arm, which had been badly set after he broke it in a fall from a horse. Chou had just converted to Mao — an unconditional conversion that made him Mao’s very faithful servant from then on. He worked assiduously to build up Mao, and told the Russians that the CCP leadership “considered that he [Mao] must be elected GenSec [General Secretary].” He assured Moscow that the CCP’s policy remained that “the anti-Japanese war comes above everything else,” and that the Party was committed to “the united front” with Chiang. He detailed the expansion of Red forces and territory, larding his account with a number of exaggerated claims, such as that the 8RA had fought no fewer than 2,689 battles against the Japanese. CCP membership, he stated, had “increased sevenfold [to] 498,000” since the war had started.

While using Chou, Mao also made sure he was cut down to size. After visiting Chou in the hospital, Tse-min told the Russians that Chou held “unhealthy” views on relations with the Nationalists, and claimed Chou had opposed shooting the prominent Trotskyist Chang Mu-tao.

Mao was also worried about Otto Braun, Moscow’s adviser in China since before the Long March, who had come to Russia with Chou, and might tell the Russians things Mao did not want them to hear. Tse-min made a point of calling Braun’s tactics “counter-revolutionary”—an accusation that could well have got Braun shot. Braun, who survived, claims that this was the intention. Chou also weighed in, calling his former friend and close colleague “an enemy of the Chinese revolution.” (Braun described Chou as his “chief prosecutor.”)

Mao later accused his rivals of “running others down to foreign daddies.” But none of them engaged in anything remotely like the character assassination that Mao practiced.

According to a Russian archive source declassified in 2005, Mao told Stalin’s envoy Mikoyan on February 3, 1949 that the situation around the Zunyi Conference was “most unfavorable.” The reason Mao gave (which was false) was that Chang Kuo-tao, with an army of 60,000 men, “was on the offensive against us.” “But,” Mao said, “we annihilated over 30,000 of his troops.” (Tikhvinsky 2005, page 65)

Mao’s first celluloid image shown in Moscow seems to have been in 1935, when a news-reel of CCP leaders was screened before the 7th Comintern Congress. Comintern No. 3 Piatnitsky, later executed by Stalin, said he thought Mao looked like a “hooligan.”

21. MOST DESIRED SCENARIO: STALIN CARVES UP CHINA WITH JAPAN (1939–40; AGE 45–46)

ON 23 AUGUST 1939 the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, and the following month the two countries invaded Poland and divided it up between them. Many in China were outraged by Stalin’s deal with Hitler. These feelings were perhaps best articulated by the founding father of the CCP, Chen Tu-hsiu, the man who had set Mao on the path of communism, but had been expelled from the Party for being too independent. After years imprisoned by the Nationalists, he had been released with other political prisoners when the Nationalist — Communist “United Front” was formed in 1937. Now he penned a poem expressing his “grief and anger,” comparing Stalin to “a ferocious devil,” who

strides imperiously into his neighbouring country

… And boils alive heroes and old friends in one fell swoop …

Right and Wrong change like day and night,

Black and White shift only at his bidding …

The Stalin — Hitler Pact opened up the prospect that Stalin might do a similar deal with Japan, with China a second Poland. Indeed, at this very moment, the Kremlin signed a ceasefire with Japan, bringing to a halt fighting that had been going on between the Soviet Red Army and the Japanese on the border of Outer Mongolia and Manchukuo. The Poland scenario caused Chiang Kai-shek acute concern, which he raised with Moscow. Mao’s reaction, however, was one of delight. His whole strategy for the war with Japan was aimed at prevailing on Russia to step in. Now a real chance appeared that Stalin might occupy part of China, and put Mao in charge.

In late September that year, when Edgar Snow asked Mao how he felt about a Soviet — Japanese pact, Mao’s reply was enthusiastic. He said that Russia might sign such a pact “as long as this does not hinder its support for … the interest of the world liberation movement [i.e., Mao himself and the CCP].” Asked whether “Soviet help to China’s liberation movement may take a somewhat similar form” to Russian occupation of Poland, Mao gave a very positive reply: “It is quite within the possibilities of Leninism.” The Poland scenario was now Mao’s model for China.

Similarly, Mao hailed Russia’s seizure of eastern Finland in early 1940, though not for public consumption. In a secret directive on 25 June, he claimed that the Soviet — Finnish peace agreement, under which Moscow annexed large swaths of Finnish territory, “guarantees the victory of the world and the Chinese revolution” (italics added). After France was divided between a German-occupied half and a puppet regime based at Vichy, Mao again drew a comparison. He wrote in coded language in a circular issued to top commanders on 1 November 1940: “There is still the possibility of the Soviet Union stepping in to adjust China — Japan relations.” Referring to a partition of the kind imposed on France, he went on to talk about the Reds “getting a better deal [relying on] the Soviet Union stepping in to do the adjustment, and us keeping trying.” Again, Mao was hoping that Russia would partition China with Japan.

Mao even had an ideal demarcation line, the Yangtze, which flows across the middle of China. To his inner circle, Mao dreamed of “drawing a border … at the Yangtze, with us ruling one half …”

Replicating the Poland scenario was indeed at the front of Stalin’s mind, and Russia began talks with Japan in September 1939, right after the signing of the Nazi — Soviet Pact, with the future of China very much at the center of the negotiations. Stalin thus had a very direct interest in the expansion both of the Chinese Red Army and of Red territory, as that would strengthen his bargaining position vis-à-vis Japan, and further his long-term goals for the postwar period.

Over the winter of 1939–40 there was a marked shift in what Mao told Moscow about the armed clashes between the Chinese Reds and Chiang’s forces. He became much more candid about the level of fighting. Before Stalin’s pact with Hitler, Mao had been presenting the clashes as the result of Nationalist attempts to wipe out Communist forces, claiming that the Reds were acting in self-defence. After the Nazi — Soviet Pact, he began to seek Stalin’s approval for expanding aggressively at Chiang’s expense. On 22 February 1940 he sent a highly belligerent report to Moscow, saying that in fighting Chiang’s forces, “victory is generally ours.” “We wiped out 6,000 [Nationalists] in Hebei, 10,000 … in Shanxi,” he reported.

Stalin did not say “Stop!” On the contrary, three days later he authorized the huge sum of US$300,000 per month for the CCP. When Chou En-lai left Moscow shortly afterwards, he brought with him a new radio system for communicating with Moscow, which he delivered to Mao. Mao’s Russian-language aide noted: “Chairman Mao alone had the right to use it. He kept all communications personally, and decided to whom he would show the information.”

AFTER THE Nazi — Soviet Pact and the prospect that Stalin might do a similar deal with Japan, in September 1939 Mao initiated a long, close and little-known collaboration with Japanese intelligence, in the hope of further sabotaging Chiang — and preserving his own forces. The CCP operation was headed by a man called Pan Hannian, who worked with the Japanese vice-consul in Shanghai, Eiichi Iwai, a senior intelligence officer. Pan was given a special Japanese ID, addressed: “To all Japanese military, gendarme and police personnel: any enquiry regarding the bearer, please contact the Japanese Consul-General.” A radio operator from Yenan was installed in Iwai’s house, for direct contact with Yenan, though in the end this channel was not used, as it was considered “too risky.”

Pan supplied Iwai with information about Chiang’s ability to resist the Japanese, his conflicts with the CCP and his relations with foreign powers, as well as about US and British agents in Hong Kong and Chongqing. This intelligence rated high with the Japanese: one item reportedly sent the Japanese ambassador to China “wild with joy.” Before Japan invaded Hong Kong in December 1941, Iwai helped arrange the evacuation of CCP agents. As Pan assured Iwai, some of the agents would continue to collect intelligence for the Japanese, while others would come to Shanghai to “help with our ‘peace movement.’ ” The “peace movement” was Japan’s chief non-military drive to force China to surrender. One prominent organization in this scheme was the “Revive Asia and Build the Country Movement,” which Pan helped to start, funded by Tokyo and largely manned by secret Communists.

The Reds used the Japanese to stab the Nationalists in the back. “At the time,” one CCP intelligence man recalled,

our Party’s tactic with the Japanese and collaborators was: “Use the hand of the enemy to strike the other enemy …” Comrade Kang Sheng told us this many times … Collaborators’ organisations were filled with our comrades, who used the knives of the Japanese to slaughter Nationalists … Of the things I knew personally, the Japanese annihilation of the [Nationalist underground army] south of the Yangtze [was one of the] masterpieces of cooperation between the Japanese and our Party.

Apart from sabotaging Chiang, Pan’s other task was to get the Japanese to allow the Reds to operate unmolested, and this went as far as floating the idea of a secret ceasefire in northern China to Japan’s highest intelligence officer in China, Major-General Sadaaki Kagesa.

In east central China, a deal was struck under which the Communist New 4th Army left the railways alone in return for the Japanese leaving the N4A alone in the countryside. For years, Japanese trains ran smoothly, and the N4A expanded quietly. The underlying reasoning behind leaving the Reds in peace was spelled out to us by Emperor Hirohito’s brother, Prince Mikasa, who was an officer in China at the time. He told us that the Japanese view was that while the Communists could be a nuisance, they had no strategic importance. The Japanese considered Chiang Kai-shek to be their main enemy.

BY SPRING 1940, huge tracts of countryside in northern China were in Communist hands. In one series of battles in March, immediately after Stalin’s tacit go-ahead, the Communists concentrated 30,000–40,000 troops, and destroyed over 6,000 Nationalists. Having established a strong position in northern China, 8RA commanders Zhu De and Peng De-huai felt it incumbent on them to do something against the Japanese, and on 1 April they ordered preparations for large-scale sabotage operations against Japanese transportation lines. Mao refused to permit the attack. Instead, he ordered all available troops to be moved to east central China to seize more territory there. Zhu and Peng were forced to abandon their plan.

At this point, Chiang invited Zhu, who minded about the continuing internal strife, to Chongqing to discuss a solution. En route, Zhu stopped in Yenan, as Mao had told him that a Party congress was about to convene. Zhu found no congress — and no sign of one. Nonetheless, he was prevented from proceeding to Chongqing, and was in effect detained in Yenan for the rest of the war. Even though he was the C-in-C of the 8RA, he played no role in the war, and Mao basically used him as a rubber stamp.

Mao sent someone else to Chongqing — Chou En-lai, who was now the exclusive channel with Chiang. Mao had completed his stranglehold on communications with the two places that counted — Moscow and Chongqing.

At this time, in May 1940, the Sino-Japanese war entered a critical phase. The Japanese began to intensify their bombing of Chongqing, which soon became the most heavily bombed city in the world to date; over the next six months, the tonnage dropped on it equaled one-third of what the Allies dropped on all Japan throughout the Pacific War; up to 10,000 civilians died in one raid. The Japanese army meanwhile advanced up the Yangtze towards Chongqing. Tokyo demanded that France close the railway from Vietnam, and that Britain shut down the Burma Road — the only routes into now landlocked China other than from Russia. Both Western states acquiesced, on 20 June and 18 July, respectively (although Britain’s closure was only for three months). In Chongqing, sentiment strengthened for a deal with Japan. Chiang — and China — were facing a momentous crisis.

To Mao the crisis was a godsend — the worse the better. He said later that he “had hoped they [the Japanese] would go as far as … Chongqing.” That way, he reckoned, Russia would have to intervene.

But Peng De-huai, now de facto chief of the 8RA after Zhu’s quasi-detention in Yenan, wanted to take some of the heat off Chongqing, and resuscitated his plans for a large operation to sabotage Japanese transportation lines in northern China, calling it by the resounding name of “Operation 100 Regiments.” On 22 July he ordered the 8RA to get ready to launch on 10 August, and radioed the plan to Mao, twice. There was no reply. When Peng got no answer to a third cable, he gave the go-ahead for the 20th.

Peng knew that Mao would dislike his operation. Not only would it help Chiang, it would also hurt the Reds, as Tokyo was bound to retaliate against Red territories. Peng was putting country before Party.

The operation, which lasted about a month, mainly involved attacks on installations, not on Japanese troops. It took the Japanese “totally by surprise,” in their own words. Damage to railways and highways in some sections was reported as “extremely serious” and “on an indescribably large scale” (the sabotage work was carried out partly by corvée labor). The Jingxing coal mines, which supplied the key Anshan iron and steel works in Manchuria, were badly hit, and the main mine put out of action “for at least half a year.” The Japanese had to pull back one division from the front against Chiang, and briefly delay plans to capture two railways into southern China.

The main effect was on Chinese morale, especially in heavily bombed Nationalist areas. The Nationalist press there praised the 8RA for taking the offensive, and for “dealing a deadly blow to enemy rumours that we are split and sunk in internal strife.” From Chongqing, Chou cabled Mao that the operation had had “an extremely big impact.” “We are publicising it and propagating it everywhere … now is the time to spread our Party’s influence …” Mao milked the fall-out to the hilt.

But in private he was seething, partly because the operation led to heavy Red casualties—90,000, according to Zhu De. The Japanese took extremely harsh reprisals against Red-controlled territory, which was soon reduced by about half; the population under Red rule fell from about 44 to some 25 million. But Peng soon got the 8RA and the bases back on their feet. In slightly over two years, the 8RA more than recovered its pre-1940 strength, to 400,000 men, and Peng had rebuilt its base areas.

But what most infuriated Mao was that the initiative lessened the chances of Chiang’s defeat — and hence of Russia intervening. In future years, Mao was to make Peng pay dearly for this, the only large-scale operation carried out by any Communist forces during the whole eight years of the Japanese occupation.

MEANWHILE, IN SPITE of Japanese bombing, Chongqing still stood, and Chiang did not collapse. Mao had to find another way to try to draw the Russians in. Chiang now came up with a plan to end the Nationalist — Communist fighting by separating the two forces physically. By this time, the 8RA had control over most of the territories they could expect to lay their hands on in northern China, so fighting there had died down. The main theater of civil war had moved to the Yangtze Valley in east central China near Shanghai and Nanjing. Chiang’s plan called for the Red N4A to move out of the Yangtze region and join the 8RA in the north, in return for letting the Reds keep virtually all of the territory seized in northern China. On 16 July 1940, Chiang offered this trade-off, couched in the form of an “order,” and gave the N4A a deadline of a month.

Mao had no intention of giving up the rich and strategic heartland. He turned Chiang’s order-offer down flat. Actually, he positively hoped that Chiang would use force to remove the N4A, and that there would be all-out civil war. “Mao’s calculation,” Russian ambassador Panyushkin wrote, was that “if there is a civil war, the Russians would back the CCP,” and Mao wanted to “nudge such a development.”

In his many cables to Moscow that summer, Mao kept urging the Russians to help him deal “serious blows” to the Nationalists. Instead of moving north, the N4A launched its biggest-ever attack on the Nationalists at the beginning of October, at a place called Yellow Bridge, wiping out 11,000 Nationalist troops and killing two generals. Chiang did not order any retaliation, and kept quiet about the defeat, as he had after many other defeats at the hands of the Reds. Unlike Mao, Chiang was afraid of igniting an all-out civil war, which would doom China’s chances against Japan. He only reiterated on 19 October that the N4A must move to the “appointed areas” within one month.

Mao met this second deadline with silence. He wanted to goad the Generalissimo into resorting to force, so that an all-out civil war could start and, as Mao told Chou, “the Soviet Union would step in.” Again Chiang took no action. Mao knew the Generalissimo’s weak spots. He wrote to Chou on 3 November: “What Chiang fears most is civil war, and the Soviet Union. So we can bully him on this.”

On 7 November 1940, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao appealed to Moscow with his most overtly bellicose proposition yet. Signed by himself, the cable was addressed to Dimitrov and Manuilsky, Mao’s main backer in the Comintern. Copies were sent to Stalin and defense minister Semyon Timoshenko. Mao’s plan was to dispatch 150,000 soldiers “to deliver a blow” at Chiang’s rear. He called this a “preventive counter-offensive,” i.e., he would fire the first shot.

Mao was asking Moscow to endorse his starting a full-scale civil war, in the thick of the Sino-Japanese War. The reason he felt able to venture this far now was his perception that the latest developments might cause Stalin to favor a strike at Chiang. The Kremlin was considering joining the Tripartite Pact of which Japan was a member, together with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. If Mao struck now, in effect forming a pincer attack with Japan on Chiang, Chiang might well collapse. If Mao contributed to the defeat of Chiang, this would greatly strengthen Stalin’s hand at the negotiating table with Tokyo.

Mao’s entreaty to Moscow to allow him to enter this unholy de facto alliance with Japan arrived as Soviet foreign minister Molotov was about to set off for Berlin, where one of his goals was to get Hitler to help Moscow muscle in as a major interested party in the Sino-Japanese War. Molotov’s agenda stated: “Discuss the necessity of reaching an honorable [sic] peace for China (Chiang Kai-shek), in which the USSR may with the participation of G[ermany] and I[taly] be ready to take on mediation … (Manchukuo stays for J[apan]).” Molotov then told the Führer: “[We] must find a compromise exit from the situation prevailing between China and Japan … in this regard the USSR and Germany could play an important role.” But the Führer was not interested.

The terms Japan offered on China did not begin to match Stalin’s expectations. Tokyo would agree only to “a Russian sphere of influence in Outer Mongolia and Xinjiang,” which was hardly alluring to Stalin, as these two places were already in his pocket. Japan also considered “recognising and accepting the three northwestern provinces (Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia) remaining a Chinese Communist base”—on condition that Russia agreed to “restrain the anti-Japanese activities of the Chinese Communists.” But this idea was again not nearly enough for Stalin, as the CCP was already occupying a much larger territory than these three provinces.

Moscow’s failure to strike a deal with Tokyo meant that Stalin’s priority remained staving off the possibility of a Japanese attack on Russia — and that meant Mao could not have his all-out war on Chiang yet. Stalin wanted a united China which could continue to bog down the Japanese. When Stalin dispatched General Chuikov as his new military adviser to Chongqing at this time, Chuikov asked why he was being sent “to Chiang Kai-shek, not the Chinese Red Army.” Stalin answered: “Your job is firmly to tie the hands of the Japanese aggressor in China.”

So the Kremlin line to Mao was: hold your fire. An order went off to him on 25 November: “for the time being, play for time, manoeuvre, and bargain with Chiang Kai-shek in every possible way over removing your forces from Central China … It is essential you do not initiate military action [i.e., against Chiang] …” But Moscow did authorize Mao to fight back if attacked: “However, if Chiang Kai-shek … attacks [you], you must strike with all your might … In this case, the responsibility for the split and civil war will fall entirely on Chiang …”

This left Mao with one hope: that Chiang would fire the first shot. But as deadlines for the N4A to move north came and went, Mao reached the conclusion that “Chiang launching a big assault is not a possibility …”

Having failed to provoke Chiang into firing the first shot, Mao now set up a situation in which Chiang’s finger would be forced to pull the trigger.

Mao’s remarks about the Polish model and a Soviet-Japanese pact did not go down well in Moscow. They were too unvarnished, and a harsh reproof ensued. “The provocative essence of this statement must be unmasked,” Comintern chief Dimitrov cabled Mao. “We urgently request that Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese comrades refrain from giving interviews to foreign correspondents like the interview with Edgar Snow, as this is being used for provocative purposes.” Mao kept his mouth shut in public, and Snow was barred from Red-held China until the Sino-Soviet split, in 1960.

The new system was highly effective. The Japanese could not even locate the radios, much less break the codes.

Mao’s deal does not seem to have extended to actual military cooperation in the field, though the Russian GRU chief in Yenan reported one occasion when Communist troops attacked Nationalist forces in Shandong in summer 1943 “in coordination with Japanese troops.”

Chuikov’s other role, which he did not mention in his memoirs, was to give Moscow an expert assessment of whether the Chinese Reds could take power after Japan was defeated.

22. DEATH TRAP FOR HIS OWN MEN (1940–41 AGE 46–47)

THE POLITICAL commissar of the New 4th Army, the Red Army based in east central China, was an old nemesis of Mao’s, Xiang Ying. A decade before, Mao had tried to have him eliminated when he opposed Mao’s torturing and killing in the AB purge. And Xiang Ying had warned against taking Mao along on the Long March, predicting that he would scheme to seize power. He had remained outspoken about Mao, sometimes even mocking him.

Xiang Ying’s HQ of about 1,000 staff and 8,000 escort troops was situated in a picturesque place called Cloud Peak, near perhaps the most strangely beautiful mountain in China, Huangshan, the Yellow Mountain, where, before one’s astonished eyes, the clouds run, dance, storm and melt at dazzling speed around Gothic-looking rocks. By December 1940, Xiang Ying’s group was the only part of the N4A south of the Yangtze, as Mao had sent 90 percent of the N4A north of the river, and put them under a separate headquarters run by his ally Liu Shao-chi.

That month, Mao set Xiang Ying’s group up to be killed by the Nationalist army, in the hope that the massacre would persuade Stalin to let him off the leash against Chiang. Months before, in July, the Generalissimo had ordered the N4A to move to northern China, an order Mao had defied. In December, however, Mao told Xiang to decamp, and cross to the north of the Yangtze.

There were two routes Xiang could take. The shortest ran due north (the North Route). The second would take him southeast, and then over the Yangtze much farther downstream (the East Route). On 10 December the Generalissimo designated the North Route, and Mao confirmed it to Xiang on the 29th.

The next day, Mao suddenly told Xiang to take the East Route, the one the Generalissimo had vetoed, but did not tell Chiang this, so Chiang thought the Reds would take the route agreed. On 3 January 1941 a cable arrived at Xiang’s HQ from the Generalissimo himself, specifying the itinerary and adding: “I have ordered all the armies along the way to ensure your safety.”

Xiang replied at once, saying he would not be taking the route Chiang had designated, and asking to have the East Route cleared instead. But this crucial message never got to Chiang — thanks to Mao. Mao had banned all Communist commanders from communicating with the Generalissimo direct, and had ordered all contacts channeled through himself. Xiang sent the message via Mao, and Mao did not send it on. So Xiang set off in wintry chill and rain on the night of 4 January 1941 along Mao’s chosen East Route not knowing that Chiang had never seen his cable.

Xiang and his troops walked right into a much larger Nationalist force, who had not been told that Xiang’s unit was coming, much less that it was only passing through, and thought this was an attack. Fighting broke out on the 6th. That day the local Nationalist commander, General Ku, gave orders to “exterminate” the Reds.

Xiang sent frantic telegrams to Yenan pleading for Mao to tell the Nationalists to hold their fire. But Mao did nothing. When Liu Shao-chi, who was with the main N4A force north of the Yangtze, wired Yenan on the 9th about the situation, Mao pretended ignorance, claiming that the last he had heard from Xiang was on the 5th, and “after that we do not know anything.”

During the most critical period of bloody fighting, the four days from 6 to 9 January, Mao claimed he received no communication. During those days, Xiang’s radio operators were sending out repeated, desperate SOS messages, and Liu Shao-chi had no problem receiving them. It is hard to believe that Mao’s communications had conveniently “broken down” just for the four days when the N4A HQ was being massacred. And even if there was some glitch, this cannot explain how Mao did nothing — for days — to resume contact. Mao had a history of using “radio trouble” as an excuse to suppress information (after the kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek in 1936, Mao had claimed he was unable to receive a vital message from Moscow). For Mao, the greater the bloodshed, the greater his excuse to turn on Chiang; and he was sacrificing someone he was glad to get rid of anyway, Xiang Ying.

After Liu brought up the subject of the N4A’s plight on the 9th, Mao’s radio miraculously started functioning again. From that day, urgent pleas from N4A HQ began to be recorded. On the 10th the HQ entreated Mao: “on the brink of doom …” “Please could you quickly make representations to Chiang and Ku to call off the encirclement. Otherwise the entire force will be wiped out.” Mao sat still.

That same day, Xiang Ying again tried to cable Chiang, again via Mao. That plea too was withheld from the Generalissimo, as Mao revealed to his liaison Chou (on the 13th): “I did not send it on to you … This cable must absolutely not be passed on.”

On the evening of the 11th Chou was attending a reception in Chongqing to celebrate the third anniversary of the CCP’s New China Daily when a message arrived from Mao. Chou announced to the assembled throng that N4A HQ had been surrounded and attacked. But even now the telegram Mao sent was not an order to act; it was merely “for your information.”

It was only the next day that Mao finally instructed Chou to “make serious representations to have the encirclement called off.” But the level of crisis was carefully toned down (“they say they can still hold out for seven days” was a distortion of much more desperate reports days before). Chou did not make any serious protest until the 13th. By that time Chiang had stopped the killing on his own initiative, on the 12th.

On 13 January, after the massacre had ended, Mao suddenly came to life, telling Chou to crank up a PR campaign for a righteous all-out war against Chiang. “Once the decision is made,” Mao said, “we will strike all the way to Sichuan [Chiang’s base].”

“Now it is a matter of a total split … of how to overthrow Chiang.”

AS HIS ARMY was no match for Chiang’s, Mao could not possibly achieve these goals without Stalin’s intervention. Chou saw the Russian ambassador on 15 January to impress on him that the Reds needed bailing out. He was given the cold shoulder. In his classified memoirs, Panyushkin recorded his suspicion that Mao had set Xiang Ying up — and that Chou had been lying.

Mao, meanwhile, appealed directly to Moscow for all-out war against Chiang, with what a Russian intelligence source calls “one hysterical telegram after another,” claiming that Chiang’s plan was to wipe out first the N4A, then the 8RA, and then “crush the CCP.”

“There is a danger our army will be completely annihilated,” Mao told Moscow.

“Danger of civil war,” noted Comintern chief Dimitrov in his diary the day this cable arrived, 16 January, calling the N4A “our troops.” Moscow did not believe Mao’s claim that Chiang was about to try to “annihilate” the CCP, and told Mao so. Mao responded with another alarmist cable, specifically asking that it go “to cde. [comrade] Stalin so that he could weigh the situation in China, and see whether he could not give us concrete military help soon.” “Help” meant direct intervention, not just arms and aid. This importuning seems to have annoyed Stalin. At a ceremony for the anniversary of Lenin’s death on 21 January, he talked disparagingly about the N4A’s nominal commander, Ye Ting, whom the Russians had once considered sending to the gulag, calling him “an undisciplined partisan.” “Need to check whether he did not provoke this incident. We, too, had a number of good partisans whom we were obliged to shoot because of their lack of discipline.” Dimitrov told Mao again more firmly than before: “Don’t take the initiative to break …”

Writing to Stalin, Dimitrov pinned the responsibility on Mao personally: “the Chinese comrades … are thoughtlessly pursuing the split; we have decided … to draw C[omrade] Mao Tse-tung’s attention to his incorrect position …” On 13 February, Stalin endorsed Dimitrov’s order to the CCP, marked for Mao personally. It was peremptory: “We consider that a split is not unavoidable. You should not strive for a split. On the contrary, you should … do everything possible … to prevent civil war erupting. Please reconsider your current position on this issue …” A cable from Mao that same day toed Moscow’s line, but vibrated with determination to get Chiang: “the split,” Mao insisted, “is inevitable in the future.”

Mao had seen Moscow’s decision coming days before. It had greatly depressed him, and led him to write a most unusual letter to his sons in Russia (to whom he very seldom wrote) on 31 January:

My sons An-ying and An-ching:

… Seeing what progress you have made, I am very happy. An-ying writes well, the Chinese characters are not bad at all, and you have aspiration for achievements: all this is very good. I have only one thing to suggest to you both: while you are young, study natural science more, and talk less politics. Politics needs to be talked about, but at the moment you should set your mind on studying natural science … Only science is real learning, and will have boundless use in the future …

Compared with his previous few rather dry and note-like letters to his sons, this one was long and intimate, even wistful. It reeked of fatigue. What was most extraordinary and absolutely unique was that Mao told his children to avoid politics!

MAO MIGHT HAVE failed to provoke full-scale war against Chiang, but he had won a number of far from negligible victories. Not the least gratifying was the death of his most outspoken critic. Xiang Ying had escaped after Chiang ordered the Nationalist army to stop fighting, but in the small hours of 14 March, while asleep in a mountain cave, he was shot dead by his aide-de-camp, who had turned against the Communists some time before. The aide took the gold and valuables Xiang Ying had in his pockets and gave himself up to the Nationalists.

Two months before Xiang Ying died, when he had just broken out of the death trap, Mao wrote a fierce condemnation of him to senior Party officials, insinuating that Xiang was “an enemy agent.” (Even today, Xiang Ying is still often blamed, along with Chiang Kai-shek, for the deaths of the N4A men and women.)

Getting rid of Xiang Ying was only one of Mao’s gains. Another was that the N4A was allowed to stay where it was. Chiang was desperate to avoid a total civil war in the middle of the war against Japan. The Russians now put tremendous heat on the Generalissimo not to impede — much less roll back — Red expansion. General Chuikov made an explicit link between Chiang agreeing to fall into line and the continuation of Russian aid to the Nationalists. The Russian ambassador noted how Chiang was beside himself with anger. He “received my statement very nervously,” wrote Panyushkin. “He paced up and down the study and … I had to repeat my question three times.”

Chiang was also highly vulnerable to pressure from America, which was his only hope of freeing himself from dependence on the Russians for arms. US president Franklin Roosevelt, whose overriding concern was (like Stalin’s) to get China to do as much fighting against Japan as possible and bog Japan down, had no leverage with the Communists, so he put all the pressure on Chiang, linking the issue of aiding his government with an end to civil conflict — in effect, regardless of who was causing it. In the wake of the N4A incident, US media announced that Washington was discussing withholding a US$50 million loan because of the civil strife. This news came just when American aid could have played a big role, as the air route over the Himalayas, known as “the Hump,” opened on 25 January.

Roosevelt leaned heavily for information about China on a private network that included Edgar Snow, largely bypassing the State Department, which he distrusted. His chief private informant on China was a Marine officer called Evans Carlson, who filed starry-eyed reports to the White House lauding the Reds, which Roosevelt recycled uncritically to members of his inner circle, one of whom told him that Carlson’s version of events was corroborated by Snow’s Red Star. Carlson was in Chongqing at the time of the N4A Incident, and immediately after it he returned to Washington to convey the Reds’ version to Roosevelt in person.

Britain did not count as far as aid was concerned, but Chiang aspired to be close to the AngloUS bloc, and so was susceptible to British pressure. Britain’s prime minister Winston Churchill disliked Chiang, regarding him as militarily useless, and a potential menace to British interests in China. The British ambassador, Clark Kerr, told Chiang that in the event of civil war Britain would not support him, regardless of who started the fighting. In the period covering the N4A Incident, his advice to London heavily favored the Communists. He openly said that Chou En-lai was worth all the Nationalists rolled into one.

In the aftermath of the N4A Incident, Moscow organized an immense publicity campaign against Chiang in the West. Communist propaganda claimed that up to 10,000 were massacred. In fact, the total casualty figure was around 2,000. Three thousand had managed to escape back to their own side by turning around and taking the North Route across the Yangtze, the one designated by Chiang. They were unmolested along the way.

Chiang had not set a trap, but he presented his case poorly. His government unwisely announced the disbanding of the N4A, leaving the impression that the Nationalists had intentionally wiped it out. Chiang was also hampered by the fact that he had not protested publicly about the many earlier and much larger clashes in which his troops had been the victims, and had even suppressed news of them, on the grounds that civil strife was bad for domestic morale — and for international aid (which all the foreign powers had made conditional on there being no civil conflict). This silence on the Generalissimo’s part had suited the Communists very well. As Red C-in-C Zhu De put it: “They [Nationalists] keep quiet, and we keep quiet, too. They are defeated and keep quiet; we win, so why should we publicise it?” As a result of all these factors, many in the West only knew about the N4A Incident, and saw it as a treacherous large-scale attack by the Nationalists on innocent Reds.

The Communist propaganda machine was effective. In Chongqing, Mao’s disinformation symphony was conducted by Chou En-lai, who alone knew Mao’s murderous role in the killing of their own men and women in the N4A. This accomplice of Mao’s was extremely successful in spreading the lie, thanks to his charm. The American journalist Martha Gellhorn, who met him at this time, told us she would have followed Chou to the ends of the world had he beckoned. But the summing up by her husband, Ernest Hemingway, catches Chou’s main attribute: “he does a fine job of selling the Communist standpoint on anything that comes up.”

In America, on 22 January the New York Herald-Tribune carried a report highly favorable to the Reds’ version of events by Edgar Snow, which opened with the words: “The first reliable account of the recent clashes …” Yet Snow’s account was based entirely on a CCP intelligence man in Hong Kong.

While the Communists’ version traveled all over the world, other observations were sidetracked by friends that Moscow and the CCP had in America. Hemingway, who was in China just after the N4A Incident, made some sharp observations about the Reds: “… as good Communists they will attempt to expand their sphere of influence … no matter what territorial limits they may accept on paper.” Thanks to the Reds’ “excellent publicity,” he wrote, “America has an exaggerated idea of the part they have played in the war against Japan. Their part has been very considerable but that of the Central Government troops has been a hundred times greater.”

“Communists,” Hemingway noted, “in my experience in Spain, always try to give the impression that they are the only ones who really fight.”

Given Hemingway’s name, his assessment might have made a considerable impact on public opinion, but it did not see the light of day until 1965. He was dissuaded from publishing his views in 1941 by a Roosevelt aide called Lauchlin Currie, who told him “our policy was to discourage civil war.”

Currie, chief White House economic adviser, visited China right after the N4A Incident. US intercepts of Soviet intelligence traffic (Venona) name Currie as helping the Russians, and some consider that he was a Soviet agent. A judicious recent study of Roosevelt and intelligence describes Currie as “a manipulable sympathizer,” concluding that he was not a spy, but a “friend” of the Russians in the White House. On this trip to China, he certainly did the Reds sterling service. In Chongqing, he told Chiang that he had brought a verbal message from Roosevelt (as well as a written one). Currie opened the verbal message with this sentence: “It appears at ten thousand miles away that the Chinese Communists are what in our country we would call socialists. We like their attitude towards the peasants, towards women and towards Japan.”

In his report to Roosevelt, Currie mainly spoke ill of Chiang, and painted an extremely rosy picture of the Reds. He claimed that “the Communists have been the only party which has been able to attract mass support,” suggesting that this was the reason they had expanded. Currie gave Roosevelt the Communists’ version of the N4A crisis.

International pressure on Chiang was so strong that on 29 January he told his ambassador in Moscow to ask the Kremlin to intervene to help resolve the crisis with the Reds, effectively asking the Russians to dictate terms. Three days later, a jubilant Mao told his army chiefs: “No matter how hard Chiang Kai-shek tries to rebel, he can try this and that, but in the end will only get himself toppled.” Mao was using the word “rebel” as if Chiang were the outlaw and he himself already on the throne. Chiang acceded to Russian demands to let Mao’s men hang on to their territorial gains and stay in the heartland of China near Nanjing and Shanghai.

Mao had been quick to see how helpful Western journalists like Snow could be to his cause, but slow to appreciate how useful the British and American governments could be in tying Chiang’s hands. His hostility to both states had been extreme. On 25 October 1940 he had told his top brass how he hoped Britain could be occupied by the Nazis, and the Japanese would continue to occupy China: “the most difficult, most dangerous and darkest scenario,” he said, was Chiang “joining the AngloUS bloc”:

We must envisage this: that the Japanese are unable to take Singapore … which will be taken by the US navy; London does not fall … Japan surrenders to America; Japanese army leaves China; America finances and arms the pro-Anglo-American Chinese … It can’t be darker than this.

This scenario was to Mao worse than Japanese occupation. But all of a sudden there was a spectacular change in his attitude. On 6 November he wrote to Chou En-lai: “I have this morning just read the important intelligence in your cable of the 3rd. So Chiang joining the AngloUS bloc is only to our advantage … Let us oppose this no more … We must forge more links with Britain and America …”

Chou En-lai had clearly enlightened Mao about how useful the West could be to him. From now on, Chou devoted more energy to cultivating Westerners, particularly Americans. And his charm offensive intensified after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and America’s presence in China greatly increased.

ON 13 APRIL 1941 Russia signed a Neutrality Pact with Japan, which freed large numbers of Japanese troops to attack Southeast Asia and Pearl Harbor. But it did not include a carve-up of China between Russia and Japan. Mao did not get his Poland scenario.

We know that Mao suppressed this cable because he told Chou En-lai, his liaison with Chiang, on 13 January, nine days and many deaths later: “I have sent you the cable of the 4th from … Xiang to Chiang. Its wording is inappropriate, so if you haven’t passed it on, please don’t.” The fact that Mao felt he still had time to withdraw the cable indicates he had only just recently sent it to Chou.

Chou told the Russians that radio links between N4A HQ and Yenan had been broken from the afternoon of the 13th—different from the dates Mao gave: 6th-9th. Clearly, Mao’s dates would have been bound to arouse suspicion in the Russians.

Another thing Currie did which was to Mao’s great advantage was to thwart Chiang’s attempt to establish a sympathetic channel to Roosevelt. Chiang requested Currie to ask Roosevelt to send him a political adviser who had access to the president. Chiang named his own choice, William Bullitt, the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union, whom Chiang knew personally, and knew to be anti-Communist. Currie rejected Chiang’s request outright, off his own bat, and there is no sign he even told Roosevelt that Chiang wanted Bullitt. When Currie got back to America, he recommended an academic, Owen Lattimore, who had not even met Roosevelt, much less had the sort of access to the President that Chiang had specified. The upshot was that Currie had a tight grip on communications between Chiang and Roosevelt.

23. BUILDING A POWER BASE THROUGH TERROR (1941–45 AGE 47–51)

ON 22 JUNE 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. This event radically altered Mao’s calculus. Soviet Russia was his sponsor and his hope; a seriously weakened — or diverted — Russia was unlikely to offer much help. Mao could not sleep for days.

To start with, there was absolutely no chance now that Russia would step in and bail him out if fighting with Chiang’s troops turned perilous. Mao immediately halted attacks. “Stop any assaults on all Nationalist units,” he ordered his armies.

Self-preservation dominated his relationship with newly weakened Russia. As a result of the German invasion, Moscow wanted the CCP to commit to engage militarily with Japanese troops if Japan should attack the Soviet Union. Stalin’s nightmare was a giant pincer assault by Japan from the east coordinated with Hitler’s attack from the west. How many Japanese troops could the CCP “divert” if that happened? Moscow asked Mao. To encourage Mao to act, Dimitrov cabled on 7 July that he was sending US$1 million in installments. Two days later, the Comintern told the CCP to draw up “concrete steps.”

Most of Mao’s colleagues thought they should take some action if Tokyo invaded the Soviet Union. The normally circumspect Liu Shao-chi wrote to Mao that if Japan attacked Russia, the CCP must launch offensives to tie up Japanese forces. Mao, however, was determined not to risk troops under any circumstances. On 18 July he told Liu that if Japan attacked Russia (which Mao had said on 2 July was “extremely likely”): “It is not a good idea … to undertake large-scale action … our armies are weak. Action will inevitably do irreparable damage.” His approach was to let the Russians do the fighting: “Everything depends on victory by the Soviet Union.”

Mao spelled this out to Peng De-huai, the acting commander of the 8th Route Army. Any coordination with the Russians was to be purely “strategic [i.e., in name only] and long-term — not in battles.” To his troops Mao repeatedly cautioned: “Do not excessively upset the [Japanese] enemy.”

To Moscow, Mao protested that his forces were too weak to be counted on: “our human and material resources [are diminishing], regions of operation [are contracting], ammunition is running out — and the situation is becoming more difficult by the day.” If his army acted, Mao argued, “there is a possibility that we will be defeated and will not be able to defend our partisan bases for long … Such an action will not be good for either of us …” He told Moscow not to expect much: “if Japan attacks the Soviet Union, our abilities in terms of coordinating military operations will not be great.”

Mao virtually admitted that his army had not been fighting the Japanese and would not start now. Only recently he had been telling Moscow he had a huge army, with 329,899 men in the 8RA alone; now he was saying his troops could hardly fire a shot.

Stalin personally cabled Mao several times asking him to keep the Japanese occupied, when the Germans were at the gates of Moscow in late 1941 and just before the battle of Stalingrad, in July 1942—in vain. Mao’s refusal to help infuriated Moscow, and he further riled his patrons by advising them to retreat to the Urals and fight a guerrilla war. Some Russians claim that Mao’s behavior was also motivated by lack of confidence in the Soviet Union, and even (according to General Chuikov) by the desire to exploit Hitler’s attack to supplant Russia. Word got around that Mao said: “Stalin cannot beat Hitler” and “24-year-old socialism cannot compete with eight-year-old fascism.”

Years later, Molotov was asked: “We knew [what Mao was doing to us] and we still helped Mao?” To which Molotov mumbled: “Right. Yes, yes. I know that is hard for you to understand. But you must not look at things in such a stark way.” “We looked like fools, but, in my opinion, we were not fools.”

Indeed, even though they were at odds, Stalin and Mao understood each other perfectly. Their relationship was based on brutal self-interest and mutual use, and they shared the same long-term goals. However much Mao’s actions displeased the Kremlin, Stalin never for one moment ceased doing business with him.

WITH NO FIGHTING against either the Japanese or the Nationalists, and with Russia in trouble and in no position to intervene, Mao seized the opportunity to go to work on his Party and mold it into an unquestioning machine in preparation for the forthcoming all-out civil war against Chiang Kai-shek.

By late 1941, Party membership had grown to some 700,000. Over 90 percent of these were people who had joined up since the start of the war against Japan, and many were young enthusiasts who had come to the Communist bases from Nationalist areas. These young volunteers were vital to Mao because they were relatively well educated, and he needed competent administrators to staff his future regime. Most of the Long Marchers and rural recruits from within the Communist bases were illiterate peasants. It was the young volunteers who were Mao’s target.

These volunteers had almost all joined up in the late 1930s as the mood among the younger middle class swung significantly to the left. This was a time when Red Russia was China’s main — and virtually only — ally and supplier of arms against Japan. Goodwill towards Russia rubbed off on the CCP. Many thought the Chinese Communists were truly dedicated to fighting Japan.

There was also widespread disenchantment with the Nationalists, who were seen as incapable of eradicating China’s widespread poverty and injustice. The CCP’s atrocities before the Long March were either unknown or forgotten, or dismissed as Nationalist propaganda. Some also believed the Party when it proclaimed that it had changed, and abandoned its old policies. And for awhile the Communists’ behavior seemed to confirm that this change was real. Many foreigners, and even some missionaries, accepted Red claims. The mole Shao Li-tzu, the Nationalists’ media overlord during the crucial period 1937–38, did much to erase the Party’s bloody past and project a benign image of the Reds. So too did Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China. Mao assiduously peddled the line that the Communists had been slandered. The CCP “has always been pretty,” he told a group of new arrivals in Yenan; “it is just that it was painted badly …”

A large number of the young volunteers congregated in Yenan, Mao’s capital. By the time Mao started his drive to condition them, some 40,000 had come there. Most were people in their late teens and early twenties who had joined the Party in the Nationalist areas, and then been sent on to Yenan.

They were tremendously excited when they first reached what had been portrayed as a revolutionary Mecca. One young volunteer described his feelings when he arrived: “At last we saw the heights of Yenan city. We were so excited we wept. We cheered from our truck … We started to sing the ‘Internationale,’ and Russia’s Motherland March.”

The new arrivals, he wrote, “really envied the stinking and dirty worn-out padded uniforms [of the veterans]. They found everything fresh, exciting and mysterious.”

The newcomers were mostly enrolled in various “schools” and “institutes” to be trained — and indoctrinated. But most very soon became disillusioned. The biggest letdown was that equality, the core of their idealism, was not only completely absent, but manifestly rejected by the regime. Inequality and privilege were ubiquitous. Every organization had three different levels of kitchen. The lowliest got roughly half the amount of meat and cooking oil allotted to middle-rankers, while the elite got much more. The very top leaders received special nutritious foods.

Likewise with clothes. The locally produced cotton was rough and uncomfortable, so softer cotton was imported for senior cadres. Mao, outwardly, dressed the same as the rest, but his underwear was made of fine material, as a servant who washed and mended for the Maos told us. The maid did not qualify for any underwear or socks at all, and kept getting colds as a result. Items like tobacco, candles and writing paper were similarly allocated by rank.

Children of the topmost leaders were sent to Russia, or had nannies of their own. Wives of senior cadres could expect to give birth in a hospital, and then have a personal nurse for a while. Officials on the next rungs down could send their children to an elite nursery. The relatively small number of ordinary Communists who were married either tended not to have children, or had to struggle if they did.

Spartan conditions and poor food led to many illnesses, but only high officials had access to scarce medicines, which were imported specially from Nationalist areas. Mao had a personal doctor from America, George Hatem, as well as Russian doctors. When he needed something — or somebody (like a physiotherapist) — he asked Moscow, or Chou En-lai in Chongqing. Senior cadres were given special hospital treatment, and no one could get into a hospital without authorization from their work unit. Food was graded in hospitals, too.

At the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War there was a Red Cross team in Yenan, which had been sent by the Nationalists. It treated local residents as well as average Communists. But the regime set about driving it away. Rumors were put about that its medicines were poisonous, and that it had been “sent by the Nationalists to murder our comrades! And to poison our drinking water, to spread germs!” Most of the team soon left. The rest were forcibly kept behind, mainly to minister to the Red elite.

The ultimate symbol of privilege in Yenan was highly visible — the only car, in fact an ambulance, which was a present from Chinese laundry workers in New York for carrying war wounded. But it never transported one injured soldier. Mao “privatised” it. It transported his guests as well, including Edgar Snow in 1939. Snow was blasé about it: “So this was Mao’s extravagance that had shocked my missionary friend,” he wrote, asserting that it was one of “a number of these laundrymen’s gifts [which] had accumulated in Yenan, where sometimes they were used to carry civilian air-raid victims to near-by hospitals.” In fact, it was the only car, and never carried any civilian wounded — and was known, appropriately, as “Chairman Mao’s car.” Even people near the top thought Mme Sun Yat-sen had given the car to Mao “for his personal use.”

Many were extremely put out. One young volunteer saw Mao in the car in spring 1939, driving with his wife, who sported “a dark red spring outfit. She and Mao Tse-tung raced by, drawing a lot of attention, and the passersby looked askance at the couple.”

Mao was well aware that his privileges were a sore point. One day an old devotee came to dine. Afterwards, Mao invited her to come back often, whereupon she blurted out: “So I”ll come to you every Sunday to treat myself to a good meal!” She noticed that “the Chairman’s smile froze, and he looked a bit awkward. I knew I had said the wrong thing …”

The Party tried to make a case for privilege: “it is not the leading comrades who ask for privilege themselves,” one leading ideologue opined. “It is the order of the Party. Take Chairman Mao, for example: the Party can order him to eat a chicken a day.”

This sophistry failed to dissipate the widespread discontent. One crack doing the rounds went: “In Yenan, only three things are equal to all — the sun, the air and the toilets.” The privilege system even extended to the group of Japanese Communists and POWs. The only one of them officially allowed to have sex was their leader, Sanzo Nosaka. “Mao wanted to keep him in a good mood,” a former Japanese POW in Yenan told us, “so he gave him a woman comrade to keep him company … we didn’t complain — not openly — people did have complaints, but they kept them to their own hearts.”

NO MATTER HOW disillusioned they might feel, the young volunteers realized that they could not leave Yenan: trying to leave was treated as desertion, with execution a distinct likelihood. The Yenan region was run like a prison. The rest of China, including other Red bases, was called “the Outside.” One volunteer described a scene he witnessed in a hospital. “We are not ill, why send us here?” two men were shouting. Their accents showed they were Long Marchers from Jiangxi. They were struggling and being pinned down by armed men.

“We’ve been asking for leave to go home to see our families, but we just don’t get the permission. They insisted we were crazy, and sent us here.”

The men wore the Long March veterans’ medal. One cadre said: “Comrades, please remember your glorious revolutionary history!”

“Fart of use this thing. We were dead and wounded plenty of times. All we get is others become officials, and have good things to eat and wear. What’s in it for us? It’s better to go home and work on the land.”

“Ha, it seems you are not crazy. You are just wavering in your revolutionary stand.”

The eyewitness noticed that “among cadres in Yenan, old and new, homesickness was common.” Cadres of peasant origin “often asked straight out to go home, and were stopped by their superiors. Some tried to run away, and once caught were immediately executed. The educated were much cleverer. They wouldn’t say they wanted to go home, they would make up some story and ask the Party to transfer them Out …”

Escape was easier for army men on the border of the region — and the rate of desertion was colossal. The target of one brigade alone, as of 29 September 1943, was to catch one thousand of its own deserters. But in the heart of the Red area, escape was virtually impossible, and most young volunteers just willed themselves to settle down.

THESE WERE THE people Mao had to depend on for his future power base. And to that end they were clearly poor material. They had come to Yenan for a dream. To make them fight for the real CCP, Mao would have to change them fundamentally, to remold them. This enormous human engineering project Mao began from early 1942. His first step was to strike at the champion of the young volunteers, a 35-year-old writer called Wang Shi-wei, a dedicated Communist who had translated Engels and Trotsky. An essay by him called “Wild Lilies,” which was published in the main newspaper in Yenan, Liberation Daily, caught Mao’s attention. In the first installment on 13 March, Shi-wei wrote:

Young people in Yenan seem to have lost steam in their life lately, and seem to have discontent in their stomachs. Why? What do we lack in our life? Some might answer: we lack nutrition, we lack vitamins … Others say: the male — female ratio in Yenan is 18 to 1, and many young men cannot find a wife … Still others will say: life in Yenan is too monotonous, too drab …

These answers are not unreasonable. But … young people … have come here to be in the revolution, and they are committed to self-sacrifice. They have not come to seek the satisfactions of food and sex or the pleasures of life.

What had shattered their dreams, he said, was institutionalized privilege, accompanied by high-handedness and arrogance. He quoted a conversation he had overheard between two young women about their bosses:

He’s always accusing you of petty bourgeois egalitarianism. Yet he himself … only looks out for his own privileges … and is completely indifferent to comrades under his charge …!

All fine words — class friendship and warmth. And it all boils down to — fart! They don’t have even elementary human sympathy!.. There are just too damn few cadres who really care about us.

In the second installment ten days later, Shi-wei sharpened his key points:

Some say there is no system of hierarchy and privilege in Yenan. This is not true. It exists. Others say, yes, there is, but it is justified. This requires us to think with our heads.

SHI-WEI WAS calling on people to think for themselves. Moreover, his arguments were reasonable and eloquent:

I am no egalitarian. But I do not think it is necessary or justified to have multiple grades in food or clothing … If, while the sick can’t even have a sip of noodle soup … some quite healthy big shots are indulging in extremely unnecessary and unjustified perks, the lower ranks will be alienated …

When Mao read this, he slammed the newspaper on his desk and demanded angrily: “Who is in charge here? Wang Shi-wei, or Marxism?” He picked up the phone and ordered a shake-up at Liberation Daily.

Shi-wei put some even sharper thoughts in a wall poster. Mao had tolerated these as a safety-valve for the young intellectuals. Wall posters had the advantage (for him) of having a restricted audience — and were easily torn down or erased. Shi-wei’s poster proclaimed: “Justice must be established in the Party. Injustice must be done away with … Ask yourselves, comrades … Are you scared of telling the ‘big shots’ what’s on your mind …? Or are you the kind that is good at persecuting the ‘little men’ with trumped-up crimes?” Shi-wei went far beyond the issue of privilege, to the heart of darkness in the Party.

The poster with Shi-wei’s words was hoisted outside the South Gate, the busiest place in the city. People flocked to read these few sentences, which articulated what many wanted to say but did not dare. Shi-wei became a hero.

One night, Mao crossed the river to read the poster by the light of a barn lantern. There he saw the eager crowds and registered Shi-wei’s enormous popularity. He said at once: “I now have a target.” He later complained: “Many people rushed from far away to … read his article. But no one wants to read mine!” “Wang Shi-wei was the king and lord master … he was in command in Yenan … and we were defeated …”

Mao decided to condemn Shi-wei as a way of scaring his sympathizers, the young volunteers. As he could not confront Shi-wei’s points head-on, he denounced him as a Trotskyist. Some remarks that Shi-wei had made in private about Trotsky and Stalin were made public. Trotsky, Shi-wei had said, was “a genius,” while Stalin was “an unloveable person” who had “created untold countless evils” in the purges. The Moscow Trials he described as “dubious.” Shi-wei was sent to prison. He spent the last years of his short life in solitary, where he was subjected to crushing pressure. In 1944, when some journalists from the Nationalist areas were allowed into Yenan, he was wheeled out to meet them and produced a robotic confession. “He said over and over again: ‘I’m a Trotskyite. I attacked Mao. I deserve to be executed … But Mao is so magnanimous … I am extremely grateful for his mercy.’ ” One reporter observed: “When he mentioned his past ‘mistakes,’ his expression was severe to the point of frightening … In my observation, his mind had been badly disturbed …”

His interrogator later revealed the background: “He said what he was told to say. Of course, he had no option. Afterwards, he lay in bed in great anguish. He clenched his fists and showed extreme bitterness.” When the Communists evacuated Yenan in 1947, he was taken along — and executed en route. One night he was hacked to death, and thrown into a dry well. He was forty-one.

AFTER MAO DESIGNATED Shi-wei as his prime target, meetings were held throughout the rest of 1942, at which the young volunteers were told to denounce him. Mao noticed that they expressed a lot of resistance. They were not sufficiently scared. He had to find another way to terrorize them.

So Mao and his KGB chief Kang Sheng devised a blanket accusation — that the vast majority of Communist organizations in the Nationalist areas were spy rings working for Chiang Kai-shek. This assertion turned virtually all the young volunteers into spy suspects, because they had either belonged to one of these organizations, or had come to Yenan under their auspices. To back this accusation there was one single piece of “evidence”—the confession of a nineteen-year-old volunteer who had been deprived of sleep and worked over by the security forces for seven days and nights, at the end of which he produced what he was told to say.

By deploying this charge, Mao found a way to place all the young volunteers in Yenan in one form of confinement or another for “screening,” starting in April 1943. Thousands were arrested and thrown into prison-caves newly carved out of the loess hillsides. In one prison alone, in the ravine behind the Date Garden — the site of the Chinese KGB, where Mao also lived — cells were dug for over 3,000 prisoners. Most of the rest were detained in their own institutions, which now became virtual prisons, sealed off and patrolled by guards. Mao gave orders that every organization must “place sentries and impose a curfew. Ban visitors and freedom of movement in or out.” The roles of jailers and interrogators were filled by those in each institution who were not suspects. These were mainly people who had not come from Nationalist areas, who were often a minority of the personnel, sometimes as few as 10–20 percent in any given institution.

Turning ordinary organizations into virtual prisons was a significant innovation of Mao’s, which he was to apply throughout his rule. Here he went far beyond anything either Hitler or Stalin achieved: he converted people’s colleagues into their jailers, with former colleagues, prisoners and jailers living in the same premises. (In Communist China, people’s workplaces and living quarters were often the same.) In this way, Mao not only drove a massive wedge between people working and living side by side, he greatly enlarged the number of people directly involved in repression, including torture, making the orbit significantly wider than either Stalin or Hitler, who mostly used secret elites (KGB, Gestapo) that held their victims in separate and unseen locales.

In incarceration, the young volunteers came under tremendous pressure to confess to being spies, and to denounce others — not really in order to find spies, but for the sake of inducing terror. Genuine spy-hunting was conducted secretly all the time by the security forces, using conventional methods. Any real suspects were “taken care of without fuss,” Mao’s security assistant Shi Zhe told us, which often meant a speedy, secret and noiseless execution.

The fake spy-hunting created the excuse for torture. Sleep deprivation was the standard technique, sometimes lasting as long as two weeks on end. There were also old-fashioned tortures like whipping, hanging by the wrists, and wrenching people’s knees to breaking point (the “tiger-bench”); as well as psychological torment — from the threat of having poisonous snakes put in one’s cave to mock execution. At night, amid the quiet of the hills, from inside the rows of caves screams of lacerating pain traveled far and wide, within earshot of most who lived in Yenan.

Mao personally gave instructions about torture (which the regime euphemistically called bi-gong-xin, meaning use “force” to produce a “confession,” which then provides “reliable evidence”): “it is not good to correct it too early or too late,” he decreed on 15 August 1943. “Too early … the campaign cannot unfold properly; and too late … the damage [to torture victims] will be too profound. So the principle should be to watch meticulously and correct at the appropriate time.” Mao wanted his victims to be in good enough shape to serve his purposes.

For month after month, life in Yenan centered on interrogations — and terrifying mass rallies, at which some young volunteers were forced to confess to being spies and to name others in front of large crowds who had been whipped into a frenzy. People who were named were then hoisted onto the platform and pressed to admit their guilt. Those who stuck to their innocence were trussed up on the spot and dragged away to prison, and some to mock execution, amidst hysterical slogan-screaming. The fear generated by these rallies was unbearable. A close colleague of Mao’s remarked at the time that the rallies were “an extremely grave war on nerves. To some people, they are more devastating than any kind of torture.”

Outside the interrogations and rallies, people were pounded flat at indoctrination meetings. All forms of relaxation, like singing and dancing, were stopped. The only moments alone afforded no peace either, consumed as they were in writing “thought examinations”—a practice hitherto known only in fascist Japan. “Get everybody to write their thought examination,” Mao ordered, “and write three times, five times, again and again … Tell everyone to spill out every single thing they have ever harboured that is not so good for the Party.” In addition, everybody was told to write down information passed unofficially by other people — termed “small broadcasts” by the regime. “You had to write down what X or Y had said,” one Yenan veteran told us, “as well as what you yourself had said which was supposed to be not so good. You had to dig into your memory endlessly and write endlessly. It was most loathsome.” The criteria for “not so good” were kept deliberately vague, so that out of fear, people would err on the side of including more.

Many tried to resist. But any sign of doing so was considered “proof” that the person resisting was a spy, on the specious grounds that: “If you are innocent, there should be nothing that cannot be reported to the Party.” The concept of privacy could not be evoked, because a Communist was required to reject the private. One man at the Administration College, which was the place where aversion was most outspoken, took a small but brave step to protest by quipping: “Do we have to write down our pillow talk with our wives at night?” which aroused chuckles all round. Naturally, the man and most others there were “found” to be spies. “Apart from one [sic] person, all teachers and administration staff are spies” in this college, Mao announced on 8 August 1943, and “many of the students are spies, too, probably more than half.” Under this kind of pressure, one man wrote down no fewer than 800 items of conversation in a frantic attempt to get off the hook.

Through forcing people to report “small broadcasts,” Mao succeeded to a very large extent in getting people to inform on each other. He thus broke trust between people, and scared them off exchanging views not just at the time in Yenan, but in the future too. By suppressing “small broadcasts,” he also plugged what was virtually the only unofficial source of information, in a context where he completely controlled all other channels. No outside press was available, and no one had access to a radio. Nor could letters be exchanged with the outside world, including one’s family: any communication from a Nationalist area was evidence of espionage. Information starvation gradually induced brain death — assisted vastly by the absence of any outlet for thinking, since one could not communicate with anyone, or put one’s thoughts on paper, even privately. During the campaign, people were put under pressure to hand in their diaries. In many a mind, there also lurked the fear of thinking, which appeared not only futile but also dangerous. Independent thinking withered away.

Two years of this type of indoctrination and terror turned the lively young volunteers from passionate exponents of justice and equality into robots. When outside journalists were allowed into Yenan for the first time after many years in June 1944, a Chongqing correspondent observed an eerie uniformity: “if you ask the same question of twenty or thirty people, from intellectuals to workers [on any topic] their replies are always more or less the same … Even questions about love, there seems to be a point of view that has been decided by meetings.” And, not surprisingly, “they unanimously and firmly deny the Party had any direct control over their thoughts.”

The journalist felt “stifled” by “the air of nervous intensity.” “Most people,” he noticed, “had very earnest faces and serious expressions. Among the big chiefs, apart from Mr. Mao Tse-tung who often has a sense of humour, and Mr. Chou En-lai who is very good at chatting, the others rarely crack a joke.” Helen Snow, wife of Edgar Snow, told us that in 1937, when she was in Yenan, people could still say things like “There goes God” behind Mao’s back. But seven years on, no one dared to say anything remotely so flippant. Mao had not only banned irony and satire (officially, since spring 1942), but criminalized humor itself. The regime invented a new catch-all offense—“Speaking Weird Words”—under which anything from skepticism to complaining to simply wise-cracking could lead to being labeled a spy.

Mao had decided that he did not want active, willing cooperation (willingness, after all, could be withdrawn). He did not want volunteers. He needed a machine, so that when he pressed the button, all its cogs would operate in unison. And he got it.

BY EARLY 1944 Russia was on the offensive against Germany, and Mao could look to it entering the war against Japan. After Japan was defeated, Mao would need cadres to fight Chiang Kai-shek, so he now began to tone down the terror.

The victims remained locked up, still living in uncertainty and torment, while the security forces began to examine their cases, to see whether there were any genuine spy suspects at all from among the mountains of coerced confessions — a process that was predictably long and slow. But one thing the apparatus was sure of from the start: that true spy suspects were far less than 1 percent of the young volunteers.

At this time, Mao ordered other Red bases to start their spy-hunting, replicating the Yenan model. He specifically warned them not to get into examining individual cases just because Yenan was doing so. All must go through the full cycle of terrorization. To spur them to whip up the same kind of frenzy as in Yenan, Mao inflated his KGB’s estimate of the proportion of spy suspects from 1 percent to 10 percent, claiming, falsely, that Yenan had uncovered a plethora of spies through his method.

It was not until another year elapsed, in spring 1945, that Mao ordered a wholesale rehabilitation of the victims. By then, he knew that Russia would be entering the war against Japan; soon he would be fighting for control of all of China, and he needed cadres fast.

The young volunteers, who numbered many tens of thousands in Yenan alone, had been through a hell of mental confusion and anguish. There had been many breakdowns — some lifelong. People who lived through Yenan remembered seeing caves in valleys crammed with people “many of whom had gone mad. Some were laughing wildly, some crying,” producing “screams and howls like wolves every night.”

The number who perished could be in the thousands. For many, suicide was the only way to end their ordeal. Some jumped off cliffs, others into wells. Those with children and spouses often killed them first. Repeat attempts were common: one physics teacher failed when he swallowed match heads (which were poisonous), then hanged himself, successfully. Survivors of suicide attempts were hounded mercilessly. One who had swallowed broken glass was brought back to life and immediately told to “write self-criticisms.”

Suicide was sometimes also used as a way to stage a protest — in one case becoming a double protest. When one detainee killed himself by jumping off a cliff, his classmates buried him opposite the residence of his interrogators, one of whom registered the import of the gesture: the ghost will come back to haunt you!

As one official put it in a letter to the leadership in March 1945, the young volunteers had been dealt “a heavy blow to their revolutionary enthusiasm … the wounds carved in their minds and hearts are very deep indeed.” All the same, Mao was confident he could rely on these people to serve him. However unhappy they might be, they were trapped in the Communist organization, and it was extraordinarily hard for them to leave, psychologically as well as physically. In the absence of options, many fell back on their faith, which made it easier for them to rationalize sacrifice. Mao adroitly exploited their idealism, convincing them to accept their maltreatment as part of “Serving the People” (a snappy expression he coined now, and which later acquired fame), and as a noble experience, soul-cleansing for the mission of saving China.

To defuse the bitterness that clung on in many hearts, Mao performed a few public “apologies” in spring 1945 before he sent his victims to the front to battle Chiang Kai-shek. What he typically did was to take off his cap and bow or salute his audience. But he would carefully present his apology as generously taking responsibility for others (“On behalf of the Centre, I apologise …”), and spread the blame — even to the victims themselves. “The whole of Yenan committed mistakes,” he averred. “The intention was to give you a nice bath, but too much potassium permanganate [used to kill lice] was put in, and your delicate skin was hurt.” This last remark implied that the victims had been too pampered and were easily hurt. Sophistry flowed liberally from Mao’s lips: “We were fighting the enemy in the dark, and so wounded our own people.” Or even: “It was like a father beating his sons. So please don’t bear grudges.” “Please just get up, dust the mud off your clothes and fight on.”

At such moments, the audiences were usually in tears, tears which were a mixture of resignation and of relief. Most went on fighting for a system that had cruelly wronged them. After they had helped Mao come to power, they would function as part of the machine that ground down the entire population of China. Mao built this machine not through inspiration or magnetism, but fundamentally through terror.

During what can be called the Yenan Terror, the whole Party was worked over, even those members who did not become outright victims themselves. These were invariably coerced into denouncing others — colleagues, friends, even spouses — which caused lasting trauma to themselves as well as to the victims. Everyone who attended a rally witnessed haunting sights, involving people they knew, and lived with the fear that the next victim might be oneself. The relentless invasion of privacy, being forced to write endless “thought examinations,” brought further stress. Mao was to say over a decade later that he did not just stamp on 80 percent of the Party—“it was in fact 100 percent, and by force, too.”

MAO NOW HAD in his hands a formidable tool for use against Chiang Kai-shek. One supreme accomplishment of the terror campaign was to squeeze out every drop of information about any link whatever with the Nationalists. Mao introduced a special “Social Relationship” form: “Tell everyone to write down every single social relationship of any kind [our italics].” At the end of the campaign, the regime compiled a dossier on every Party member. The result was that Mao knew every channel the Nationalists might use to infiltrate in the forthcoming showdown. Indeed, during the civil war, while the Nationalists were penetrated like sieves, they had virtually zero success infiltrating the Communists. Mao had forged a machine that was virtually watertight.

Mao also prepared a “no-questions-asked” anti-Chiang force by fomenting hatred of Chiang. When most of the young volunteers joined up, the CCP was not at war with the Nationalists, and many did not hate Chiang the way Mao wanted them to. As Mao said, “Some people think the Nationalist Party is very good, very pretty.” One senior official noted at the time that “new cadres cherish extremely big illusions about Chiang, while old cadres have weakened their class hatred” for the Generalissimo. Chiang was the undisputed leader of China’s war against Japan. It was Chiang who got America and Britain to retrocede their territorial concessions (except Hong Kong) in 1943—an historic event for which even Mao felt obliged to order grand celebrations. And it was under Chiang that China was accepted as one of “the Big Four,” along with America, Russia and Britain. China’s permanent seat and veto on the UN Security Council, which Mao eventually inherited, were acquired thanks to Chiang.

At the time, Chiang was generally regarded as the nation-builder of modern China, who had done away with the warlords and unified the country — and led the war against Japan. Mao had to smash this image. In the terror campaign, he ordered the Party to be “re-educated” on the question: “Who is the nation-builder of China: the Nationalists or the CCP?” The corollary of the drive to break Chiang’s image was to create the myth that Mao was the founder of modern China.

Mao manufactured the fault-lines and hate-lines against Chiang through his “spy hunt” campaign, in which it was spying for the Nationalists, not for the Japanese, that was made the key issue, sometimes identifying the Nationalists with the Japanese by vague assimilation. It was via the terror campaign that Mao turned Chiang into the enemy of the average Communist.

TO STIR UP anti-Chiang fervor in the CCP, Mao cogitated another “massacre” by the Nationalists like the one involving the New 4th Army HQ two years before. This time the sacrificial victims included his only surviving brother, Tse-min.

Tse-min had been working in Xinjiang, in the far northwest, which had been a Russian satellite for years. In 1942 the warlord there turned against the Reds. Sensing that their lives were in danger, Tse-min and the other regional CCP leaders cabled Mao repeatedly asking to be evacuated. But they were told to stay put. In early 1943, Tse-min and more than 140 other Communists and their families, including his wife and son, and a girl Mao had called his “daughter,” Si-qi (Mao’s future daughter-in-law), were imprisoned.

As the warlord had gone over to Chongqing, the obvious thing to do was for the CCP’s liaison, Chou En-lai, to ask for their release from the Nationalist government, which is what the Russians urged Chou to do. The CCP leadership collectively (in the name of the Secretariat) also asked Chou to do this on 10 February. Two days later, on the 12th, Mao sent Chou a separate cable, signed only by him, with the agenda for talks with the Nationalists; the release of the Xinjiang group was not on it. Chou, by now taking orders from Mao alone, did not raise the matter of the Xinjiang group in his many meetings with the Nationalists.

Lin Biao was in Chongqing at the time, and on 16 June he got to a meeting with Russian ambassador Panyushkin ahead of Chou, and told Panyushkin that Chou had not done anything, and that “orders” had come from “Yenan.” When Chou turned up, he started claiming he had written to Chiang some three months before, but had had no reply. At this point, Panyushkin reported to Moscow, Lin Biao “sat hanging his head.” Chou was obviously lying. In fact, Chou and Lin had seen Chiang only days before, on the 7th, when Chiang had been friendly and Chou had said nothing about his imprisoned comrades in Xinjiang.

The upshot was that Mao’s brother Tse-min and two other senior CCP figures were executed on 27 September on charges of plotting a coup. But with so few deaths — only three — Mao was unable to cry “Massacre.” He did not make any announcement condemning the executions, either, as this might raise questions about whether the Communists were indeed guilty as charged. For years, Tse-min’s death remained a public non-event.

Mao knew the German invasion was coming, and when, to within a matter of hours, and had alerted the Kremlin. Comintern chief Dimitrov records in his diary the tip-off from the CCP saying: “Germany will attack the USSR … the date—21 June 1941!” (bold in Dimitrov original). This is the only such warning singled out. This information had been acquired by CCP moles. When the Germans did invade on the 22nd, the Kremlin belatedly acknowledged the CCP’s help, although it seems it discounted the warning.

This project is known as zheng-feng, usually translated as “Rectification Campaign.”

Executions sometimes served other functions. Shi Zhe recounted visiting a hospital where he was shown a big basin: “inside was a male corpse, aged about thirty, soaked in formaldehyde.” Hospital staff told him they had needed corpses for dissection, and “Kang Sheng authorised us” to kill three “counter-revolutionaries” for medical purposes.

Using exhausting meetings to bend — and break — people was to solidify into an integral part of Mao’s rule.

The other detainees, including Tse-min’s wife and their son Yuan-xin, were released later, with the Generalissimo’s authorization.

24. UNCOWED OPPONENT POISONED (1941–45 AGE 47–51)

WHILE USING terror to turn ordinary Party members into cogs for his machine, Mao also went to work on his top colleagues. His aim was to break them and make them kowtow, with the ultimate goal of establishing himself as their undisputed leader, so that he would never have to rely on Moscow’s blessing again. He picked the time when Stalin was preoccupied with the war against Germany.

In autumn 1941, Mao convened a series of Politburo meetings at which all those who had opposed him in the past in any way had to make groveling self-condemnations and pledge loyalty to him. Most did so meekly, including nominal Party chief Lo Fu, and former Party No. 1 Po Ku, the man who had reduced Mao to a figurehead before the Long March. (Chou En-lai was away in Chongqing.) But one top figure in Yenan refused to crawl: this was Wang Ming, the man who had been the main threat to Mao since his return from Moscow late in 1937.

After the German invasion of Russia, Wang Ming figured that Stalin was bound to be displeased with Mao’s refusal to take action against Japan to help the Soviet Union. In October 1941 he caught sight of a cable from Comintern chief Dimitrov to Mao posing fifteen extremely stern questions, including: What measures is the CCP adopting to strike at the Japanese army so that Japan cannot open up a second front against the Soviet Union? Armed with this hard evidence of Moscow’s vexation with Mao, Wang Ming pounced on the chance to reverse his personal and political fortunes. He declined to perform self-flagellation, and criticized Mao’s policy vis-à-vis both Chiang and the Japanese. He also demanded that Mao debate with him in a large Party forum, declaring that he was prepared to take the issue all the way up to the Comintern.

Mao’s original plan had been to nail down absolute and unconditional submission from his colleagues and then call the long-delayed Party congress and mount the Party throne. He had been de facto Party No. 1 for nearly seven years, but with no commensurate post or title. However, Wang Ming’s challenge wrecked Mao’s plan. If the stubborn challenger managed to open up a debate about Mao’s war policies at the congress, the conclave could well take his side. Mao had to shelve the congress.

Mao was infuriated at this unexpected turn of events, and his wrath gushed forth from his pen. In this period, he wrote and rewrote nine ranting articles, cursing Wang Ming and his past allies, including Chou En-lai, even though Chou had since switched allegiance. These articles are still a closely guarded secret today. According to Mao’s secretary they were a “huge release of emotions, with much shrill excessive language.” One passage referred to his colleagues as “most pitiful little worms”; “inside these people, there is not even half a real Marx, living Marx, fragrant Marx … there is nothing but fake Marx, dead Marx, stinking Marx …”

Mao reworked these articles repeatedly, and then put them away. He remained obsessively attached to them right up to the end of his life three and a half decades later. In June 1974, after Wang Ming had died in exile in Moscow, and while Chou En-lai had terminal cancer of the bladder, Mao had the articles taken out of the archives and had them read out to him (Mao then was almost blind). And only one month before he died in 1976, he had them read to him yet again.

MEANWHILE, JUST AFTER he had challenged Mao in October 1941, Wang Ming collapsed from a sudden illness, and was hospitalized. He claimed he had been poisoned by Mao — which may or may not have been true on this occasion. What is certain is that Mao attempted to have him poisoned the following March, when Wang Ming was just about to be discharged from the hospital. Wang Ming remained defiant: “I will not bow my head even if all others are fawning,” he vowed. In private, he had written poems calling Mao “anti-the Soviet Union, and anti-the Chinese Communist Party.” Furthermore, he said, Mao was “setting up his personal dictatorship”; “Everything he does is for himself, and he does not care about anything else.” Mao could expect the highly articulate Wang Ming to speak out against him.

The agent for Mao’s poisoning operation was a doctor called Jin Mao-yue, who had originally come to Yenan as part of a Nationalist medical team, at the height of the cooperation between the Nationalists and the CCP. He was a qualified gynecologist and obstetrician, and so the Communists kept him in Yenan. When Wang Ming was admitted to the hospital, Jin was assigned as his chief doctor. That he poisoned Wang Ming was established by an official inquiry involving Yenan’s leading doctors in mid-1943. Its findings, which we obtained, remain a well-kept secret.

As of the beginning of March 1942, Wang Ming was described as “ready to be discharged.” Dr. Jin had been trying to keep him in the hospital by advocating a whole string of operations—“having his teeth taken out, piles excised and tonsils removed.” These operations were dropped after another doctor objected. The inquiry found that the operations for both the tonsils and the piles (which were “large”) “would have been dangerous.”

But just as Wang Ming was about to leave the hospital on the 13th, Dr. Jin gave him some pills, after which Wang Ming collapsed. The inquiry recorded that: “On 13 March, after taking one pill, [Wang Ming] felt a headache. On 14 March, he took two, and started vomiting, his liver was in severe pain, his spleen was swollen, there was pain in the area of his heart.” After more pills from Dr. Jin, Wang Ming “was diagnosed as having acute cholecystitis [of the gallbladder] and … hepatomegaly [enlarged liver].”

The inquiry never found out what the pills were, as there was no prescription. Under questioning, Dr. Jin gave “very vague answers” about the type of drug, and the amount. But the inquiry established that after taking the pills, Wang Ming showed “symptoms of poisoning.”

Dr. Jin then prescribed further pills: large doses of calomel and soda — two medicines which, when taken in combination, produce poison in the form of corrosive mercury chloride. The inquiry found that these prescriptions were “enough to kill several people.” The report detailed many “symptoms of mercury poisoning,” and concluded: “It is a fact that he was poisoned.”

Wang Ming would have died if he had taken all Dr. Jin’s poisonous prescriptions. But he grew suspicious and stopped. In June, Dr. Jin halted his murderous treatment. The reason was that a new and very senior Russian liaison man, Pyotr Vladimirov, had just arrived in Yenan. Vladimirov, who held the rank of general, had worked in northwest China, spoke fluent Chinese and knew some of the CCP leaders personally. His reports went to Stalin. He also brought with him a GRU surgeon, Andrei Orlov, who also held the rank of general, plus an extra radio operator.

On 16 July, shortly after Vladimirov and Orlov arrived, Moscow was informed, for the first time, that Wang Ming “after nine months of treatment is at death’s door.” At this stage it seems Wang Ming did not tell the Russians that he suspected he was being poisoned. Not only was he in Mao’s hands, but he had no proof. He first tried to drive a wedge between Stalin and Mao by telling Vladimirov that Mao had no intention of helping Russia out militarily. Wang Ming, Vladimirov recorded on 18 July, “says that if Japan attacks [Russia] … the Soviet Union ought not to count on the [CCP].”

Vladimirov quickly became very critical of Mao. “Spies watch our every step,” he noted. “These last few days [Kang Sheng] has been foisting upon me a teacher of Russian whom I am supposed to accept as a pupil. I have never seen a Chinese girl of such striking beauty. The girl doesn’t give us a day’s peace …” Within weeks, Vladimirov had fired the cook who he was convinced was “a Kang Sheng informer.”

At the beginning of 1943, Wang Ming’s condition took a sharp turn for the worse. Doctors, who now had the Russian surgeon Orlov in their ranks, recommended treatment in the Nationalist area or Russia. Mao refused to let Wang Ming go.

To save his life and get himself to Moscow, Wang Ming knew he had to make Stalin feel that he was politically useful. On 8 January, he dictated a long cable to Vladimirov, addressed to Stalin by name. According to his own account, it detailed Mao’s “many crimes,” which he called “anti-Soviet and anti-Party.” At the end, he “inquired if it was possible to send a plane for me and have me treated in Moscow, where I would also give the Comintern leadership particulars about Mao’s crimes.”

Wang Ming’s message, much watered down by Vladimirov, reached Comintern chief Dimitrov on 1 February. Mao obviously found out that Wang Ming had got a dangerous message out to Russia, as he immediately cabled Dimitrov with counter-accusations against Wang Ming. Still, Dimitrov promised Wang Ming: “We’ll have you flown to Moscow.”

At this point Dr. Jin made another attempt on Wang Ming’s life. On 12 February, right after Dimitrov’s message, Jin prescribed the deadly combination of calomel and soda again. A week later, he prescribed tannic acid as an enema at a strength that would have been fatal. This time, Wang Ming not only did not follow the prescriptions, he kept them carefully.

Mao clearly felt a sense of acute urgency, as he now made a startling move. On 20 March, in total secrecy, he convened the Politburo — minus Wang Ming — and got himself made supreme leader of the Party, becoming chairman of both the Politburo and the Secretariat. The resolution gave Mao absolute power, and actually spelled out: “On all issues … the Chairman has the power to make final decisions.” Wang Ming was dropped from the core group, the Secretariat.

This was the first time Mao became Party No. 1 on paper, as well as in fact. And yet this was a deeply surreptitious affair, which was kept entirely secret from his own Party, and from Moscow — and was to stay secret throughout Mao’s life, probably known to no more than a handful of people.

Wang Ming may have got wind of Mao’s maneuver, as he now, for the first time, exposed the poisoning attempt to the Russians. On 22 March he showed Orlov one of Dr. Jin’s prescriptions, which Vladimirov cabled to Moscow. Moscow wired back immediately, saying that the prescription “causes slow poisoning” and “in grave cases — death.” Wang Ming then showed the prescription to Yenan medical chief Dr. Nelson Fu, and this led to an inquiry, which found beyond doubt that Wang Ming had been poisoned.

But Mao, the ace schemer, turned the inquiry to his advantage. Whilst the inquiry did establish that attempts had been made on Wang Ming’s life, Mao used the fact that it was still sitting as an excuse to stall Wang Ming’s trip.

And for Mao, scapegoats were always to hand — in this case Dr. Jin. On 28 March, Mme Mao “came to see me quite unexpectedly,” Vladimirov noted. “She talked at length about ‘the unreliability of Doctor Jin who [she said] is probably a [Nationalist] agent …’ ”

FIFTY-SIX YEARS LATER, in a drab concrete building in dusty Peking, the only surviving member of the medical panel of fifteen that drew up the official findings in Yenan, Dr. Y, a physically energetic and mentally alert 87-year-old, gave us a tape-recorded interview.

Once the decision was taken to carry out a medical inquiry, Dr. Y was assigned to establish whether Wang Ming had indeed been poisoned. He “stayed with Wang Ming for a month, sleeping in his study,” heating up his urine each day and then dipping a sliver of gold into it and examining it under a microscope. It proved to contain mercury: “He was being poisoned slowly,” Dr. Y reported to his medical superior. But nothing was done for weeks. The medical inquiry finally opened on 30 June, more than three months after the poisoning was exposed. The findings, drawn up on 20 July, stated that Wang Ming had definitely been poisoned by Dr. Jin, and were signed by Jin himself. After his signature, he wrote in brackets: “Will make separate statement about several of the points.” But he never did. In the middle of one meeting, in front of his colleagues, he threw himself at the feet of Wang Ming’s wife, weeping. Dr. Y was present. He told us that Dr. Jin “went down on his knees, begged for forgiveness, saying he was wrong.” “He admitted mistakes. Of course, he wouldn’t admit it was deliberate.” In fact, Dr. Jin had been carrying a pocket medical manual, which stated specifically that it was taboo to use calomel in combination with soda, and he had underlined these words. Dr. Y had actually confronted him on this: “Look, it’s written here: taboo prescription, great harm. You have even underlined it!” Jin was silent.

Far from getting into trouble, however, Jin was protected by being taken to the haunt of the security apparatus, Date Garden, where he lived with the security elite. He continued to be one of the doctors for Mao and other leaders, which would have been inconceivable if Mao had had the slightest doubt about either his competence or his trustworthiness.

The inquiry did not mention Mao, of course, but the Russians had no doubt: “Wang Ming was being poisoned and … Mao Tse-tung and Kang Sheng were involved.”

MAO’S KEY ACCOMPLICE in preventing Wang Ming from making it to Moscow was, once again, Chou En-lai, his liaison in Chongqing. Chiang Kai-shek’s permission was needed for Russian planes to come to Yenan so Mao hypocritically asked Chou to obtain permission from Chiang for a Russian plane to come and collect Wang Ming, while making it clear to Chou that he did not want Wang Ming to leave. Chou duly told the Russians that “the Nationalists would not allow cde. Wang Ming to leave Yenan.” In fact, Lin Biao, who was in Chongqing at the time, told Soviet ambassador Panyushkin that Chou never raised the issue with the Nationalists, because of “instructions” from “Yenan.”

At this very time, Chou got Chiang’s clearance for a Russian plane to bring Mao’s son An-ying back from Russia. An-ying, who had been in Russia since 1937, was now a 21-year-old gung-ho enthusiast at a military academy where he had joined the Soviet Communist Party. He had written three letters to Stalin asking to be assigned to the German front.

As he was not sent to the front, An-ying asked permission to return to China after graduation on 1 May 1943. He was not only Mao’s eldest son, but also the only probable male heir, as Mao’s other son, An-ching, was mentally handicapped. An-ying cabled his father (via Dimitrov), and Mao replied saying that Chiang had cleared the plane trip. An-ying got ready to go home, and asked the head of the International Communist School to look after his brother: “Don’t let him out of your sight … He is an honest person, only he has hearing ailments and his nerves are wrecked.”

On 19 August, a Russian plane left for Yenan to collect Wang Ming, and An-ying was supposed to be on it. But that day he was called in to see Dimitrov. When the plane arrived in Yenan, there was no An-ying on board. This was Moscow saying to Mao that it wanted Wang Ming first before releasing his son.

But Mao held on to Wang Ming. Vladimirov recorded: “doctors were … told to say Wang Ming … couldn’t stand the strain of the flight … [The] crew kept delaying the flight as long as they could, but [Mao] got his way.”

Another Soviet plane came on 20 October and stayed four days, before leaving with some Russian intelligence men — but again not Wang Ming. “On seeing [Dr Orlov],” Vladimirov recorded, “Wang Ming burst into tears … he is … still unable to walk … [his] friends have abandoned him … He is all alone in the full sense of the word …” It was two years now since his health crisis had begun, and a good nineteen months since the start of the poisoning. In those long and agonizing days, his wife looked after him devotedly, presenting a strong calm face to him. But occasionally she would lock the door and try to release her anguish. Her son told us that as a young boy he once caught her rolling and kicking on the earthen floor, muffling her sobbing and screaming with a towel. The son was too young to comprehend, but the traumatic scene was etched into his memory.

In Yenan, Dr. Y said, “many people knew that Wang Ming had been poisoned by mercury, and that someone was trying to murder him … Word got around.” And not only among senior officials, but also among ordinary Party members who had connections to medical staff. So many people suspected the truth that Mao felt he had to flush out the undercurrent of suspicion and kill it off. That meant getting the Wang Mings to make a public denial.

On 1 November, a week after the second Russian plane had left, Mao convened a large meeting for senior officials. He himself sat on the platform. Wang Ming was kept away. The star witness was a veteran commander who was trotted out, from detention, to say that over a year before, Mrs. Wang Ming had told him her husband was being poisoned — and had strongly hinted that Mao was responsible. Mrs. Wang Ming then made a vehement denial onstage. On 15 November she wrote to Mao and the Politburo, vowing that she and her husband had not even harbored such a thought, and felt nothing but gratitude to Mao. The poisoning case was formally closed.

MAO HAD DEFIED Stalin’s will to an astonishing degree, as Moscow would not send a plane all the way to Yenan for nothing. Furthermore, strange things happened to the Russians in Yenan around now. Their radio station was wrecked, apparently sabotaged. Their dogs, which they had brought to provide security and an alarm system — as well as protection against wolves — were shot. Mao dared to do all this because he knew he was the victor, and that Stalin needed him and was committed to him. It was during this same period that Stalin told the Americans, on 30 October 1943, he would eventually enter the war against Japan. Russian arms supplies to Mao were greatly stepped up.

When Dimitrov cabled Mao again on 17 November about getting Wang Ming to Russia, Mao did not respond. And when Dimitrov wrote to Wang Ming on 13 December it was in an unmistakably sad tone. After saying that Wang Ming’s daughter, whom the Dimitrovs had adopted, was well, Dimitrov went on resignedly: “As regards your Party matters, try to settle them yourselves. It is not expedient to intervene from here for now.”

But Stalin clearly decided that Mao should be served a warning. Shortly afterwards, on 22 December, he authorized Dimitrov to send a most unusual telegram, in which he told Mao:

Needless to say, after the disbanding of the Comintern, its leaders … can no longer intervene in the internal affairs of the CCP. But … I cannot help offering a few words about my worries caused by the situation in the CCP … I think the policy of curtailing the struggle against the foreign occupiers is politically wrong, and the current action to depart from the national united front is also wrong …

Saying that he had “suspicions” about Mao’s intelligence chief, Kang Sheng, whom he described as “helping the enemy,” Dimitrov told Mao that “the campaign conducted to incriminate” Wang Ming (and Chou En-lai) was “wrong.”

Dimitrov opened the telegram with a very pointed passage about An-ying:

Regarding your son. I have arranged for him to be enrolled in the Military-Political Academy … He is a talented young man, so I have no doubt that you will find in him a reliable and good assistant. He sends his regards.

Dimitrov did not say a word about An-ying’s long-overdue return to China. And mentioning him in one breath with Wang Ming was the clearest possible way of saying to Mao that his own son was a hostage, just as Chiang Kai-shek’s had been.

WHEN VLADIMIROV translated Dimitrov’s cable to him on 2 January 1944, Mao’s immediate reaction was one of defiance. He wrote an answer there and then. It was a blunt, point-by-point retort:

To Comrade Dimitrov,

1. We have not curtailed the anti-Japanese struggle. On the contrary …

2. Our line as regards collaboration with the [Nationalists] remains unchanged …

3. Our relations with Chou En-lai are good. We are not going to cut him off from the Party at all. Chou En-lai has made great progress.

4. Wang Ming has been engaged in various anti-Party activities …

5. I assure you and can guarantee that the Chinese Communist Party loves and highly respects Comrade Stalin and the Soviet Union …

6. … Wang Ming is not trustworthy. He was once arrested in Shanghai. Several people have said that when he was in prison he admitted to being a member of the Communist Party. He was released after this. There has also been talk about his suspicious connections with Mif [purged in Russia] …

Kang Sheng is a trustworthy man …

Mao Tse-tung

Mao was an impulsive man, but he usually held his impulses at bay. He once told staff who commented on his “unruffled calm” and “impeccable self-control”: “It’s not that I am not angry. Sometimes I am so angry I feel my lungs are bursting. But I know I must control myself, and not show anything.”

Mao’s hair-trigger reaction on this occasion was uncharacteristic. The reason he exploded was not that he cared so much for his son, but because this was the first time Moscow tried to blackmail him. But he instantly regretted his eruption. He could not afford to offend Moscow, especially now that the tide had turned against Germany, and Russia was likely to move against Japan soon — and sweep him to power.

Next day, Mao told Vladimirov he “had given much thought” to Dimitrov’s telegram, and asked if his answer had been sent. If not, “he certainly would change its content.”

But the cable had gone off, and over the following days a visibly anxious Mao set out to woo Vladimirov. On 4 January, he invited Vladimirov to an operatic show, and “immediately began speaking of his respect for the Soviet Union … and I. V. Stalin … Mao said he sincerely respected the Chinese comrades who had received education or worked in the USSR …” Next day, Mao called on Vladimirov again: “apparently he understands,” Vladimirov noted, “that the telegram he sent to Dimitrov on January 2 was rude and ill-considered.” On the 6th, Mao threw a dinner for the Russians: “Everything was ceremonious, friendly and … servile.” The following day, Mao came alone to Vladimirov’s place at 9:00 AM — for him, the middle of the night. “Suddenly,” Mao “began to speak of Wang Ming — in an entirely different, almost friendly tone!” At the end, Mao sat down and wrote another telegram to Dimitrov, and asked Vladimirov to “tick it out” at once. “Mao looked perturbed, his gestures betraying tension and nervousness … He looked extremely tired, as if he hadn’t had a minute’s sleep.”

The tone of the second telegram was groveling:

I sincerely thank you for the instructions you gave me. I shall study them thoroughly … and take measures according to them … Regarding inner-Party questions, our policy is aimed at unity. The same policy will be conducted towards Wang Ming … I ask you to rest assured. All your thoughts, all your feelings are close to my heart …

Mao then paid Wang Ming two long visits.

Dimitrov wrote on 25 February saying that he was particularly pleased by Mao’s second (groveling) telegram. This and subsequent missives had a we-can-work-together tone.

On 28 March, Mao asked Vladimirov to send a telegram to his son An-ying. It told him not to think about returning to China. Mao, it said, was “very happy about his successes in his studies.” Mao asked his son “not to worry about his [Mao’s] health. He feels well.” He asked An-ying to convey “warm greetings” to Manuilsky and Dimitrov, who, Mao said, “have assisted … the Chinese revolution. It is to them that Chinese comrades and their children owe their education in [Russia], their upbringing and maintenance.”

This was Mao saying to Moscow: I accept you keeping An-ying as a hostage. With this understanding, An-ying remained in Russia.

Dimitrov meanwhile told Wang Ming to compromise. While protesting that the rift was not his fault, a helpless Wang Ming promised to work with Mao, but asked Moscow to try to restrain him.

The result was a stand-off, but very much in Mao’s favor. Mao was allowed to keep Wang Ming in Yenan, and do what he wanted with him, including vilifying him, so long as he did not kill him. In fact, vilification of Wang Ming was a major activity in the Yenan terror campaign from 1942. Endless indoctrination sessions were held to blacken his name among Party members. At one rally denouncing him in absentia (Mao made sure that Wang Ming was kept well away from the Party cadres), Wang Ming’s wife managed to get onto the stage and say the accusations were untrue. She asked for Wang Ming to be fetched to clarify the facts. As no one stirred, she threw herself at Mao, sobbing loudly, clinging to his legs and asking him to be just. Mao sat there, unmoved as a stone.

By the end of the campaign, it was established in people’s minds that Wang Ming was Party Enemy No. 1, and he was in no position thereafter to challenge Mao’s supremacy — even though Mao still saw him as a threat, because he remained unbroken. Five years later another attempt was made on his life.

WHILE EMPLOYING poisoning to tackle Wang Ming, in 1943 Mao also turned on Chou En-lai. This was in spite of the fact that Chou had collaborated in quite a bit of Mao’s dirty work, not least in letting Tse-min be killed, and in preventing his old friend Wang Ming from getting out to Moscow for treatment.

Mao, however, wanted more than just slavish deference. He wanted Chou thoroughly scared and broken. The terror campaign in 1942–43 threatened to condemn Chou as the big spy chief. In fact, it was partly to frame Chou that Mao invented the charge that most Communist organizations in Nationalist areas were spies for Chiang, because Chou was in charge of these organizations. In order to have Chou on the spot in Yenan and put him through the terror mill, Mao sent menacing cables ordering him back from Chongqing. One, on 15 June 1943, read: “Don’t linger … to avoid people talking.” And when Chou came back in July the first thing Mao said to his face was a warning: “Don’t leave your heart in the enemy camp!” Chou panicked, and responded with fulsome fawning, singing Mao’s praises at length at his “welcome” party. Then, in November, he bashed himself for five days in front of the Politburo, saying he had “committed extremely big crimes,” been “an accomplice” to Wang Ming, and had “the character of a slave”—for the wrong master, of course. He told larger Party audiences that he and other leaders had been disasters, and that it was Mao who had saved the Party from them. Thoroughly tamed, Chou became a self-abasing slave to Mao for more than three decades, until almost his last breath.

THE LAST MAN Mao set out to de-fang was Peng De-huai, the acting commander of the 8th Route Army. Peng had opposed Mao in the 1930s. In 1940 he had defied Mao’s wishes and launched the only large-scale operation by the Reds against the Japanese during the entire Sino-Japanese War. And he had done something else equally infuriating to Mao — tried to implement some of the ideals which in Mao’s lexicon were to be brandished solely as propaganda. “Democracy, freedom, equality and fraternity,” Mao said, were concepts to be deployed only “for our political needs.” He berated Peng for “talking about them as genuine ideals.”

Mao had tolerated Peng because Peng had played an extremely useful role in expanding the army and running the base areas. (The bases under Peng enjoyed a much better relationship with the local people, and a much less oppressive atmosphere than Yenan.) In autumn 1943, Mao brought him back to Yenan, although he did not put Peng on the hit list immediately because he did not want to have to deal with too many enemies all at the same time. Peng did not mince his words over the many things that galled him in Yenan, including Mao’s effort to build a cult of himself, which Peng called plain “wrong.” One day, talking to a young Party member who had just been released from Mao’s prison, he said pensively: “It is hard to stand alone honorably.”

From early 1945 Mao set out to tarnish Peng’s credibility and reputation — and to unnerve him. In a series of long harassment meetings, Mao’s henchmen bombarded him with insults and accusations — an experience he described as “being fucked for forty days.” The sessions attacking Peng went on intermittently right up to the eve of the Japanese surrender, when they stopped because Mao needed commanders of Peng’s caliber to fight Chiang Kai-shek. By this point, Mao had systematically subdued all his opponents.

Po Ku died in a plane crash in 1946.

Dr. Jin remained particularly close to Mme Mao, on whom he had performed an induced abortion and oviduct ligation in summer 1942. When the Communists took power, he became head of the Peking Hospital, which catered for Party leaders and their families. On the night of 30 September 1950, Mao’s daughter-in-law was taken to this hospital with appendicitis. The signature of the next-of-kin was needed to okay the operation. As her husband, An-ying, was not present, it was Dr. Jin who authorized the operation.

On 20 May 1943. This was largely a formality, to mollify Stalin’s Western allies, and it brought little change in the relationship between Moscow and Mao.

This meant that Wang Ming’s explanation of the way he got out of prison was unsatisfactory, and therefore suspicious.

In 1948, when Mao planned to go to Russia, he was concerned about what Wang Ming might get up to in his absence. So Wang Ming was given Lysol, ostensibly for his chronic constipation. Lysol was a powerful disinfectant used for cleaning urinals, and would wreck the intestines. Wang Ming survived because his wife immediately stopped administering it to him after he cried out in agony. No other top CCP leader had so many “medical accidents”—or indeed any serious accidents at all. The possibility of it being an accident can be ruled out by the fact that the doctor who prescribed the Lysol remained chief physician for Mao.

A restricted official circular dated 7 July 1948 and other medical documents acknowledged this “medical accident,” but made the pharmacist the scapegoat. In September 1998, a friend of the pharmacist telephoned her for us. After greetings, the colleague said: “I have a writer here, and she would like to talk to you about the enema.” To this question out of the blue, we heard the pharmacist answer without a second of hesitation or bafflement: “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“What medicine did you give?”

“I don’t know what medicine I gave. I’ve forgotten.”

It seems that for the past fifty years, the matter had remained at the forefront of the pharmacist’s mind.

25. SUPREME PARTY LEADER AT LAST (1942–45 AGE 48–51)

MAO’S TERROR campaign made him so many enemies, from raw recruits to veteran Party leaders, that he came to feel more unsafe than ever, and redoubled his personal security. In autumn 1942 a special Praetorian Guard was inaugurated. Mao gave up his public residence at Yang Hill altogether and lived full-time in Date Garden, the isolated haunt of his KGB, several kilometers outside Yenan. Surrounded by high walls and heavily guarded, the estate was a place to stay away from. Anyone venturing near could easily draw suspicion as a spy. There Mao had a special residence built, designed to withstand the heaviest aerial bombing.

But even Date Garden was not safe enough. Beyond it, shielded by willows, birch-leaf pears and red-trunk poplars, a path led through wild chrysanthemums into the depths of the hills — and an even more secret lair. There, in a place called the Back Ravine, a group of dwellings was prepared for Mao in a fastness in the hillside. The path was broadened so that Mao’s car could be driven virtually to his door. Only a handful of people knew he lived here.

Mao’s main room here, as in most of his residences, had a second door, leading to a bolthole dug through to the other side of the hill. The secret passage also ran all the way up to the stage of a large auditorium, so that Mao could step onto it without having to go outside. The auditorium and Mao’s caves were so well camouflaged by the hills and woods that one would not suspect their existence until one virtually reached the doorstep. But from Mao’s place, it was easy to monitor the path leading up. The auditorium was designed, like most public buildings in Yenan, by a man who had studied architecture in Italy, and it looked like a Catholic church. But it was never used, except for a few gatherings of the security force. Mao wanted it kept ultra-secret, exclusively his own. Today Mao’s caves nestle in total seclusion, and the grand hall stands in ruins like a dilapidated cathedral, spectral, in a landscape of loess gullies extending as far as the eye can see.

Mao’s security assistant Shi Zhe told us: “I controlled that entrance to the path. No one was allowed in just because they wanted to come.” Few leaders ever came. Any who did could take only one bodyguard in, but “not near where Mao Tse-tung lived.” Mao’s own men escorted the leader, alone, to Mao’s place.

MAO’S CAMPAIGN terrorized even the terrorizers like his deputy and main hatchet man, Kang Sheng. Shi Zhe observed that Kang was living in a state of deep fear of Mao in this period. Though Kang had helped concoct the charge of a vast spy ring in the CCP, it could rebound, as Kang himself had a murky background. Where and when he had joined the CCP was a mystery: he had no witness to the event, and the sponsors he named denied his claim. Many letters had reached Mao casting doubts on Kang, some saying he had buckled when arrested by the Nationalists. Most damning of all, Dimitrov (i.e., Stalin) condemned Kang to Mao in December 1943 as “dubious,” saying that Kang was “helping the enemy.” In fact, back in 1940, the Russians had urged that Kang be kept out of the leadership.

Far from being put off by Kang’s murky past, Mao positively relished it. Like Stalin, who employed ex-Mensheviks like Vyshinsky, Mao used people’s vulnerability as a way of giving himself a hold over subordinates. He kept Kang on as the chief of his KGB, in charge of vetting and condemning others. Kang remained in fear of Mao right up to his death in 1975; one of his last acts was to plead with Mao that he was “clean.”

Mao made full use of Kang’s penchant for persecution and twisted personality. Kang had been in Moscow during the show trials and had participated in Stalin-type purging. He enjoyed watching people being stricken with terror at mass rallies, and liked to play with his victims’ anguish. Like Stalin, who sometimes invited victims to his study for a last talk, Kang savored the pleasure of watching the condemned fall into the abyss at the very moment they thought they were safe. He was a sadist. One story he particularly liked telling was about a landlord in his home district who thrashed his farmhands with a whip made from asses’ penises. Kang was also a voyeur. After one fifteen-year-old girl invented a story of how she had used her body for spying, he had her repeat it all over the region, while he listened again and again. One of Kang’s closest bonds with Mao came from supplying him with erotica, and swapping lewd tales.

Kang later became a scapegoat for the Yenan Terror, but everything he did was on Mao’s orders. Actually, during the campaign, Mao limited his power by making Party bosses in each unit — rather than Kang’s KGB — responsible for designating and taking charge of most victims in their institution. In the future Communist China, there was to be no exact equivalent of the Soviet KGB.

ANOTHER ASSOCIATE who was dealt a tremendous scare in the campaign was Liu Shao-chi. Not only did some of the organizations named as spy outfits come under his domain, but he had also been arrested by the Nationalists — in fact, several times, which qualified him to be a prime suspect as a possible turncoat. If he gave any cause for dissatisfaction, Mao could easily have him condemned as a spymaster. Liu had actually been against the terror campaign when he first came back to Yenan at the end of 1942; but after this brief flutter of distaste, Russian liaison Vladimirov described him as “changing his views rapidly,” and cozying up to Kang Sheng. Thereafter, Liu toed Mao’s line, and played an ignominious role in the campaign. As he was extremely able, Mao picked him to be his second-in-command, a position Liu held until his downfall in the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

TWO WOMEN WHO were to become extremely powerful in the future entered the realm of persecution now: Mao’s wife and the wife of the man who was to be his deputy in the Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao. Both women had come to Yenan through Party organizations that were being condemned as spy centers. One day in 1943, while Lin Biao was in Chongqing, his wife, Ye Qun, was tied onto a horse and dragged off into detention. Luckily for her, Lin Biao was someone who enjoyed a most uncommon crony relationship with Mao. When Lin returned to Yenan in July, he marched into the Party office dealing with his wife’s case. “Fuck you!” he shouted, throwing his whip on the desk. “We fight wars at the front, and you screw my wife in the rear!” His wife was released, and given the all-clear. This brief experience of intense fear was the beginning of the sclerosis of the heart for Ye Qun. When she rose with her husband in the Cultural Revolution, she became a victimizer.

The later notorious Mme Mao, Jiang Qing, also learned terror during the Yenan campaign. She had been arrested by the Nationalists years before, and had got out of prison by recanting, and entertaining her jailers — and, according to Kang Sheng (later), sleeping with them. Her past had been a big issue in 1938, when Mao wanted to marry her. Now, although no one dared to denounce her, because she was Mao’s wife, she lived in dread that somebody might, particularly as she too had to perform “self-examinations” and endure criticisms from others. She tried to hide by asking for sick leave, but unlike Lin Biao, who simply told his wife to stay at home, Mao ordered his wife to go back to her unit and experience the scare cycle. Although what she went through was nothing compared with the ordeal suffered by the vast majority, it was enough to make her live in fear about her past for the rest of her life. More than two decades later, when she acquired enormous power, this obsessive fear contributed to the imprisonment and death of many people who knew about her. Above all, Jiang Qing was afraid of her husband. Unlike her predecessor Gui-yuan, she never dared to make a scene about Mao’s womanizing, much less to contemplate leaving him. Whatever squalid jobs he assigned her, she would do.

The terror campaign in Yenan also marked her debut at persecuting others, for which she developed a taste. Her first victim was her daughter’s nineteen-year-old nanny, whom she got thrown into prison, as the nanny revealed fifty-five years later.

Mao and Jiang Qing had one child together, a daughter, Li Na, born on 3 August 1940. By the time Li Na was one and a half, she was on her third nanny, who came from a poor peasant family in Shanxi. The nanny’s father had died humping goods across the freezing Yellow River for the Reds. She herself started making shoes for the Red Army from a young age, and was promoted to her district Communist bureaucracy. She and some other “reliable” women were then selected to be nannies for the leaders.

After a health check and some training, she was taken on as the Maos’ nanny and servant. One of her chores was to wash Mme Mao’s hair. She described how Mme Mao would lose her temper if her hair was not washed exactly the way she wanted. One day in 1943, the nanny was suddenly summoned to appear in front of Mme Mao and two staff members. “You have come here with poison! Confess!” screamed Mme Mao. That night the nanny was taken to the prison in the Back Ravine behind Date Garden.

She was accused of poisoning the Maos’ milk, which came from their own specially guarded cow at the security apparatus’ compound. What had happened was that Mme Mao developed diarrhea. After grilling the chef and the orderly, she told Kang Sheng she wanted the nanny imprisoned and interrogated.

In prison, the nanny shared a cave with a large number of other women. During the day, the main activity was spinning, with a very high quota, which she had to work flat out to fill. The regime had spotted that this was an ideal occupation for prisoners, as they were forced to be stationary, thus easy to guard, while being economically productive. The evenings were a time for interrogations, during which the nanny was copiously abused with remarks like: “Why don’t you simply confess and get it over with, you shit-making machine!” During the night, guards poked their heads into the cave to watch against suicide and escape. After nine months she was released, but the gut-wrenching fear she experienced stayed with her forever.

IT WAS THROUGH the Yenan Terror that Mao accomplished another most important goal: building up his own personality cult. People who lived through this period all remembered it as a turning point when they “firmly established in our minds that Chairman Mao is our only wise leader.” Till then it had been possible to admire Mao while having reservations about him, and to gossip about his marriage to Jiang Qing while still supporting him as the leader. When they were first told to “study” a Mao speech, many had responded with an audible groan: “the same old thing,” “can’t be bothered to go over it again,” “too simplistic.” Quite a few had been reluctant to chant “Long live Chairman Mao.” One recalled thinking: “This was a slogan for emperors. Why are we doing this? I felt creepy and refused to shout it.” This kind of independent talk — and thinking — was killed off by the campaign, and the deification of Mao established. This worship had nothing to do with spontaneous popularity; it stemmed from terror.

Every step in the construction of his cult was choreographed by Mao himself. He minutely controlled its main vehicle, Liberation Daily, using giant headlines like “Comrade Mao Tse-tung is the Saviour of the Chinese People!” And it was Mao who initiated the phenomenon of badges of his head, which he first issued to the elite during the campaign. In 1943 he got a huge head of himself carved in gold relief on the façade of a major auditorium. It was in that year that Mao’s portraits were first printed en masse and sold to private homes, and that the Mao anthem, “The East Is Red,” became a household song.

It was also in 1943 that a later widely used expression, “Mao Tse-tung Thought,” first saw the light of day, in an article by the Red Prof, Wang Jia-xiang. Mao stage-managed this eulogy himself. The Red Prof’s wife described how Mao dropped in one sunny day when the dates were green on the trees. After some banter about mah-jong, Mao asked her husband to write an article to commemorate the twenty-second anniversary of the Party that July, dropping heavy hints as to what it should say. Mao checked the final text and made it obligatory reading for all.

Every day, at the interminable meetings, Mao’s simplistic formula was hammered in: for everything wrong in the Party, blame others; for every success — himself. To achieve this end, history was rewritten, and indeed often stood on its head. The battle of Tucheng, the biggest disaster on the Long March, fought under Mao’s command, was now cited as an example of what happened when the army “violated Mao Tse-tung’s principles.” The first action against Japan, Pingxingguan, was credited to Mao, although it had been fought against his wishes. “Just make it clear to Party members and cadres that the leadership headed by Comrade Mao Tse-tung is completely correct,” Mao instructed.

IN EARLY 1945 Mao was ready to convene the long-delayed Party congress and have himself inaugurated as the supreme leader of the CCP. The 7th Party Congress opened in Yenan on 23 April, seventeen years after the 6th, in 1928. Mao had been postponing it for years, to make sure he had absolute control.

Mao had not only weeded the list of delegates with a fine-tooth comb, he had held most of them in virtual imprisonment for five years, and put them through the grinder of his long-drawn-out terror campaign. Of the original 500 or so delegates, half were victimized as spy suspects and suffered appallingly, with some committing suicide and others having mental breakdowns. Many were then dropped. Hundreds of new delegates were appointed, guaranteed loyal to Mao.

The congress hall was dominated by a huge slogan hung over the platform: “March Forward under the Banner of Mao Tse-tung!” Mao was voted chairman of all three top bodies: the Central Committee, the Politburo and the Secretariat. For the first time since the founding of the Party, Mao formally, and publicly, became its head. It had taken him twenty-four years. It was an emotional moment for Mao, and, as always when his emotions were in play, self-pity was never far off. As he raked over his tale of woes, he was on the verge of tears.

Mao Tse-tung had become the Stalin of the CCP.

Later, Liu encouraged some cadres to speak up against the terror, but not until it was over in 1945. In 1950 he told Soviet ambassador Nikolai Roshchin that its methods were “perversions which cost a great number of victims.”

In 1943, a booklet was published in Yenan, entitled A Brief History of China’s Labour Movement, written by Deng Zhong-xia, a labor leader executed by the Nationalists. The original text had been published in 1930 in Russia, and contained no mention of Mao’s role. Now a passage was inserted: “In 1922, thanks to the leadership of comrade Mao Tse-tung, the workers’ movement in Hunan developed stormily …”