Read The Red Flag: A History of Communism Online
Authors: David Priestland
The Red Flag: A History of Communism (48 page)
Communist rule could therefore be violent and chaotic. The Communist armies that arrived in Jiangxi and other base areas were rag-tag groups of intellectuals, Guomindang defectors, bandits, criminals, workers and peasants. They were then confronted with the task of imposing their control over a fractured political landscape whilst simultaneously trying to resist frequent Guomindang attacks. Meanwhile,
secret societies, lineage brotherhoods, rival villages and a plethora of Guomindang and Communist militias all competed for power.
The leadership itself was also highly divided – as was the norm in the Communist party. Despite Mao’s military success, Moscow and the Shanghai-based Communist party thought him much too revolutionary and undisciplined. In 1929 the Comintern had tried to impose control over the Chinese Communists, by sending Wang Ming and the so-called ‘Returned Students’, trained at the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, to run the party, and they in turn were intent on imposing control over this stubborn maverick. They disliked Mao’s preference for informal, guerrilla war, preferring more conventional military action. And they tended to favour attacks on cities to Mao’s rural methods. Mao’s appointment as President of the Jiangxi soviet was actually a clever way of promoting him out of harm’s way.
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By 1934 Mao had effectively been sidelined by the Muscovite group. Paradoxically, however, it was Chiang Kaishek who came to his rescue. Chiang’s fifth campaign against the Jiangxi republic was successful, and the Communists were forced to flee. The tortuous search for a new base area, which took them from the south-western region of Jiangxi to the northern region of Shaanxi and the city of Yan’an, became known as the Long March. Mao yet again showed his prowess as a military leader and the success of his guerrilla methods, swiftly re-establishing himself as a contender for sole leadership.
In future years Mao skilfully transformed the Long March into the transcendent moment in Communist mythology. Mao became a Moses, leading his chosen people to the Promised Land, enduring enormous suffering on the way.
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In fact, Mao and the central leadership had a rather more comfortable journey than most, because they were borne in litters (though they did work on intelligence and strategy at night; Mao, like Stalin, was a nocturnal worker). Even so, the Long March was an extraordinary feat. Six thousand miles were covered in a year – about seventeen miles a day, over what was often very difficult terrain. They were pursued by the Guomindang, and were especially vulnerable at river crossings. Of the 86,000 that set off, only a few thousand reached the safety of Yan’an.
As the Communists fled from Chiang’s armies, more dangerous enemies were gathering their forces. The Japanese, their economy ravaged by the Great Depression, now sought captive markets in China. Meanwhile, of
course, Nazism had forced the Comintern to change its line. Moscow now pressed Mao and the Yan’an government to create a Popular Front with the Guomindang in order to resist the Japanese. Mao, unsurprisingly, was hostile to the idea. In 1936 he gave in to Comintern pressure, however, taking part in campaigns against the Japanese, but he resisted Moscow’s continuing attempts to force him into a close alliance with the nationalists. He insisted on maintaining the independence of the Communist Party, expanding the Communist base areas, and following his tried-and-tested guerrilla tactics.
The Long March had enhanced Mao’s prestige, but he was still part of a collective leadership, and the Comintern was still trying to assert its authority. Again, Stalin sent Wang Ming to re-establish Moscow’s chain of command and to force Mao to accept the Popular Front policy. For a time Mao was under serious threat; it may be that Stalin was planning to implicate him in a planned trial of Comintern ‘rightists’ in 1938.
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But Mao was rescued by renewed tensions between Chiang and the Communist party, and by the capture of Wang’s capital, Wuhan, by the Japanese – Mao’s strategy of fleeing to distant Yan’an was vindicated. By the end of 1938, Mao had secured Moscow’s support as party leader, though it was only in 1943 that Mao’s dominance was wholly secure. And it was in this period, holed up in Yan’an, that Mao established himself as preeminent leader, and began to forge a new radical Communist amalgam.
The Yan’an region had been the cradle of Chinese civilization, but it had become one of the most isolated and poorest parts of China. The landscape was rugged, the earth yellow. Edgar Snow, the American journalist, tried to convey the effect to his distant readership, using the common references of European modernist culture:
There are few genuine mountains, only endless broken hills, hills as interminable as a sentence by James Joyce, and even more tiresome. Yet the effect is often strikingly like Picasso, the sharp-angled shadowing and coloring changing miraculously with the sun’s wheel, and toward dusk it becomes a magnificent sea of purpled hilltops with dark velvety folds running down, like the pleats of a mandarin skirt, to ravines that seem bottomless.
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The town of Yan’an, meanwhile, was an ancient stronghold, far from the sophistication of the cities of the eastern seaboard, with massive crenellated walls, dominated by a white pagoda on a hill. But it was precisely its distance from cosmopolitan civilization that made it ideal for Mao’s
new Communist community. Mao had always been mistrustful of big cities, and felt much more at home in this provincial backwater.
Yan’an was also an ideal place for Mao to establish himself as the prophet of a new, ‘Sinified’ Marxism.
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Mao, who had had so much trouble from Moscow-educated Communists, realized that he needed to establish a theoretical justification for his independent line; it was not enough to be a military leader and expert on mobilizing the peasantry. In the next few years he sought to establish an agreed party history that vindicated his alleged ‘deviations’, and he wrote several works of Marxist philosophy, which were to become the foundations of ‘Mao Zedong Thought’.
Mao’s untrained Marxism was idiosyncratic, and did not stick to the rigid, dogmatic language that was taught in Moscow. Agnes Smedley commented on his style:
Mao was known as the theoretician. But his theories were rooted in Chinese history and in experience on the battlefield. Most Chinese Communists think in terms of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and some take pride in their ability to quote chapter and verse of these or lecture on them for three or four hours. Mao could do this too, but seldom attempted it. His lectures… were like his conversations, based on Chinese life and history. Hundreds of students who poured into Yan’an had been accustomed to drawing their mental nourishment only from the Soviet Union or from a few writers of Germany or other countries. Mao, however, spoke to them of their own country and people… He quoted from such novels as
Dream of the Red Chamber
or
All Men are Brothers
… His poetry had the quality of the old masters, but through it ran a clear stream of social and personal speculation.
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It was intrinsically difficult to translate Marxist concepts into Chinese; words like ‘bourgeois’ or ‘feudal’ could not just be imported unchanged as they could into European languages. The word ‘proletariat’ itself was rendered by the Chinese characters for ‘without property class’ (
wuchan jieji
), blurring the distinction between the urban and rural poor, and making it easier to treat the peasantry on a par with industrial workers. But Mao went further, and deliberately used traditional Chinese terms to describe Marxist ideas. For instance, he used the old term for ‘autocracy’ (
ducai
) as an equivalent for ‘[proletarian] dictatorship’;
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he also used the Confucian concept of ‘Great Harmony’ (
datong
) as synonymous with
‘Communism’, combining a Marxist theory of history with a traditional Chinese notion of a future golden age.
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The works of Marxist philosophy he wrote in this period were also full of Chinese concepts. His discussions of dialectics and the conflict of opposites – though central to a view of Marxism so concerned with struggle – were also reminiscent of Daoist theories on the presence of opposites,
yin
and
yang
, in all things.
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Mao read Soviet textbooks on dialectics carefully, but his annotations often showed he wanted to relate general abstractions to concrete, Chinese circumstances.
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Yet the ‘Sinified Marxism’ of this period was less specifically Chinese than is sometimes thought.
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It was, in fact, a version of egalitarian Radical, mobilizing Communism suited to a guerrilla force that needed to gain the support of peasants. It tended to see the power of human will and ideological inspiration as important, and not just economic forces;
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it argued that peasants could be as revolutionary a force as workers (although it never denied that the industrial working class would ultimately inherit the earth); and it embraced the principle of the ‘mass line’, the notion that the party had to practise socialist ‘democracy’ and ‘learn from’ the masses (although, of course, this was far from liberal democracy; the more libertarian elements of the Marxist tradition were absent from Mao’s thought, and Chinese Marxist thought more generally).
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In practice, the Communism that prevailed in Yan’an combined idealism and pragmatism. It was a strongly egalitarian system: everybody, even leaders, was expected to perform some form of manual labour, and lived in the draughty caves outside the town. New arrivals at Yan’an were housed eight to a cave, and life consisted of productive work, military training, theatrical performances and, perhaps most importantly, long, intense political discussions in study sessions. There were inequalities: Mao’s cave was larger than most and had excellent views, and salary differences did exist.
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These hypocrisies attracted criticism from some of the more idealistic urban intellectuals who had flocked to Yan’an, hoping to find the radical equality they had demanded during the May 4th movement. Some complained of the absence of political principle and passion amongst Yan’an’s officials; others – especially the writer Ding Ling – protested at officials’ attitude towards women: despite claims to the contrary, women were not treated as equals in Yan’an.
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Although Ding Ling did not say so openly, the promiscuous Mao, who had a callous attitude towards his many wives and girlfriends, was a major culprit.
However, compared with its Soviet Communist counterpart of the later 1930s, Yan’an’s culture was puritanical and egalitarian, as was fully on show in the Yan’anites’ dress: men and women wore either military uniforms or the Sun Yat-sen suit, a military-style outfit based on the Japanese student uniform, and popular amongst both Communists and Guomindang officials (it later came to be known as the ‘cadre suit’, or the ‘Mao suit’ in the West).
Nevertheless, the Communists, whilst puritanical, could not be doctrinaire, because they needed the support of the peasantry as a whole. They therefore made every effort to avoid alienating local elites. The ‘three-thirds’ system of government allowed traditional bosses to retain some influence, giving Communists only a third of seats on village councils, with the second third reserved for non-Communist ‘progressives’, and the final third open to anybody, as long as they were not Japanese collaborators. Most of the richer peasants were also allowed to keep their land. The poorer, meanwhile, benefited from lower rents and taxes, and seem to have welcomed the guerrillas who were sent to live and work amongst them to improve the local economy. Yan’an’s combination of ideological flexibility and activism seems to have attracted support among both peasants and elites.
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Initially the atmosphere amongst the Communists in Yan’an itself was also relatively tolerant. But with the outbreak of the Japanese war in 1937 and the influx of new recruits from widely diverse backgrounds, Mao insisted on greater ideological unity, and he became especially suspicious of the bourgeois ‘individualism’ of intellectuals from Guomindang areas. From 1939 onwards he followed Stalin’s example in using ideological texts as tools to make party officials conform, ordering the translation of Stalin’s 1938
Short Course
of Communist party history and writing his own supplements on the Chinese experience. Senior officials were then expected to read and learn the texts. However, by 1942 Mao had decided that the whole party had to be trained, to ‘rectify’ their thoughts. Only if Communists truly internalized the ideology would they have the commitment to win the war and establish Communism.
‘Rectification’ was a Chinese variation on the Soviet party ‘purge’, though it was much more elaborate, probably reflecting a Confucian belief in the importance of moral education and correct thinking.
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Party members were instructed to study twenty-two texts of ideology and party history, most of them written by Mao himself, which members were told to relate to their personal experience. They filled out questionnaires, which asked them to give accounts of any instances of ‘dogmatism’, ‘formalism’ and ‘sectarianism’, and to describe their plans for thought reform. They were also expected to denounce others in so-called ‘short broadcasts’. These documents were then checked by leaders, and the group then held a session in which individuals were publicly criticized and confessions made. Eventually most errant party members were received back into the fold, their thoughts supposedly reformed.