This period of Mao’s deepening interest in recording—and ultimately changing—the realities of rural China overlapped with momentous changes in Chinese politics. The United Front of the Communists and the Guomindang seemed to be working, and to hold firm even after Sun Yat-sen’s death from cancer in 1925. Massive popular movements against foreign imperialism in China came into being in mid-1925, sparked in part by the shooting of civilian Chinese demonstrators by British forces seeking to protect foreign lives and property. Workers began to take a prominent part in politics, and Communist Party membership expanded dramatically: still under a thousand in early 1925, the Communist Party had expanded to over 57,000 members by the spring of 1927.
Aided by Comintern advisers, and by the well-trained junior officers graduating from the military academy that the two parties had established at Whampoa near Canton, both the Communists and the Guomindang rapidly expanded their military base as well. Chiang Kai-shek, a former trusted aide to Sun Yat-sen, and the commandant of the Whampoa military academy, swiftly emerged as a dominant force in the Guomindang armies and built up his own fanatically loyal following among the recently graduated young officers. Despite some inevitable ideological tensions, the combined Guomindang and Communist armies moved out of Canton under Chiang Kai-shek’s overall command in the spring of 1926, in a concerted drive to break the power of the various militarist regimes in China and to reunify the country.
Mao was one of those called on by the United Front to organize peasant forces in the countryside to help this northern expedition on its way, and by August 1926 the United Front armies had swept into Changsha. That fall they routed the remaining Hunan militarists and reached the Yangtze River. Mao partook of these sweet tastes of victory. Surely few occasions in his political life could have rivaled the moment on December 20, 1926, when he stood on the stage in the Magic Lantern Theater in Changsha before a cheering audience of over three hundred, as a bell rang at two P.M. to announce the beginning of a speech by “Mr. Mao Zedong, born in Xiangtan, Hunan province. Mr. Mao is a leader of the Chinese revolution, and he has paid particular attention to the peasant movement.” Such an experience, Mao told the audience, as he launched into his analysis of the class components of revolution, would have been inconceivable a year before.
On January 4, 1927, Mao began a month-long trip through the Hunan countryside he knew best, including the two counties of Xiangtan and Xiangxiang, birthplaces respectively of his father and his mother. In a forty-page report of sustained passion and excitement which he submitted to the Communist Party in mid-February, Mao described the seizures of power in the area by the poorest of the peasants and the humiliations of the landlords as they were forced to walk, wearing tall conical paper hats of mockery, through the villages they once had dominated. He spoke of the women who seized the chance for independence from their husbands, of the secret-society members and even the petty criminals who found their strength through this new form of rebellion, of the joys of violence and the joys of righting ancient wrongs, and of the children’s games now politicized in allegorical form.
It is perhaps the most passionate piece of writing Mao ever did, but even here, as if he could not resist it, he included careful tables with neat rows of figures on the size and location of each peasant association. Xiangxiang county he judged to be the most radical, with 190,544 peasant association members in 499 village groupings; Xiangtan county was fourth, with 120,460 members in 450 village groupings. The only close rival in rhetorical excitement to this report had been Mao’s “Great Union of the Popular Masses,” written in the summer of 1919. There Mao had written: “From Lake Dongting to the Min River, the tide rides ever higher. Heaven and earth are aroused by it, the wicked are put to flight by it. Ha! We know it! We are awakened! The world is ours, the state is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act? We must act energetically to carry out the great union of the popular masses, which will not brook a moment’s delay!” Now in 1927 it was the peasantry of his former home who held China’s destiny: “All revolutionary parties and all revolutionary comrades will stand before them to be tested, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. To march at their head and lead them? To stand behind them, gesticulating and criticizing them? Or to stand opposite them and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose among the three, but by force of circumstances you are fated to make the choice quickly.”
6
The Long Retreat
IN THE SPRING OF 1927 it all came crashing down. The labor unions in Shanghai were gutted first, in April, by Chiang Kai-shek and his allies among the warlords, who had all grown alarmed over the mounting power of the Communist Party. Working with local secret-society and criminal organizations, and with the open connivance of the Westerners in the international concessions, Chiang ordered a roundup of Communists and labor leaders. Thousands were killed and the Communist movement in the city was almost wiped out. Communist theorists in the Comintern, and Stalin himself, claimed that the terror was a positive development, since it “proved” that the right wing of the Guomindang had shown its counterrevolutionary nature; they insisted, however, that the Chinese Communists continued to work with the “left” wing of the Guomindang, which was based in the industrial tri-city area of Wuhan, inland up the Yangtze. After leaving Changsha, Mao was sent to Wuhan so he could continue working in his capacity as an alternate member of the Guomindang Central Committee; and in an attempt to placate the left Guomindang, the Communist Central Committee ordered Mao to dampen the enthusiasm of the peasant masses he had just been writing so enthusiastically about. By midsummer of 1927, the Wuhan Guomindang leaders had decided to throw in their lot with Chiang Kai-shek and abandon the Communists. At this stage, a new wave of terror and repression of the Communists took place in the Wuhan region, and against the peasant associations there and in Hunan. It was in this grim situation that the Communist Party Central Committee—again reacting to orders from Stalin and the Comintern—ordered Mao to re-fan the flames of peasant insurrection, so as to move the revolution to a higher stage.
Not surprisingly, Mao found the task impossible. In his excited Hunan report of February 1927 he had tallied up a total of 1,367,727 members of the peasant associations in the province of Hunan alone. Now, in August 1927, away from the base area he knew best, and in the midst of massive military repression, Mao could raise only a few thousand followers. Most of them were killed or routed by local militarists after brief campaigns.
One thing that Mao did learn at this time was the importance of having adequate military force to back up one’s political goals. There had been hints of his thinking on this matter before, but it was in a report on August 7, 1927, that he first gave it concrete expression. Mao opened by commenting on the now defunct Guomindang alliance, in terms that unmistakably echoed his feelings about the young Changsha bride whose suicide in 1919 had prompted some of his finest early writing. All of the Communists had been mistaken, he wrote, in thinking “that the Guomindang belonged to others. We did not realize that it was an empty house waiting for people to move in. Later, like a maiden getting into the bridal sedan chair, we reluctantly moved into this empty house, but we never made up our mind to play the host there.” Only when it was too late did the Communist leadership try to get the peasants and workers to join the Nationalists. His Hunan report “had its impact in Hunan,” Mao continued, “but it had no influence whatever on the center. The broad masses inside and outside the Party want revolution, yet the Party’s guidance is not revolutionary; there really is a hint of something counter-revolutionary about it.” Chiang Kai-shek had the right idea—he “rose by grasping the gun.” Now it was time for the Communist Party to do the same: “From now on, we should pay the greatest attention to military affairs. We must know that political power is obtained from the barrel of the gun.”
By mid-September, Mao and what peasant forces he had been able to muster were narrowly surviving in eastern Hunan. He was still hoping to launch an attack on Changsha, as a prelude to wider uprisings throughout Hunan province, though true to his new insight he was also hoping that two regiments of Communist troops might be dispatched to help him. His tone remained optimistic, but the details of his report did not suggest much hope for the success of a major rising against the strong local militarists who now dominated the region. “Preparations” had been made to cut electric power lines and interdict railroad travel in the area, said Mao, but he gave no specifics of what they were. “The peasants of the suburbs” outside Changsha would constitute the “main force,” and they would be supported in turn by the rickshaw pullers in the city, and by “about five hundred wounded soldiers” who were billeted in the city. It was a hopeless scheme and it went nowhere.
In early October, Mao, completely trapped on the border between Hunan and Jiangxi provinces, with nowhere else to go, began discussions with two veteran secret-society leaders who had created their own protected base area about a hundred miles south in the border mountain ranges of Jinggangshan. By late October 1927, the three men had worked out an agreement, and Mao marched south with his remaining peasant forces to join them in their mountain lair. The retreat meant that Mao lost contact with Yang Kaihui and their children. They had just had their third child, another boy, whom they named Anlong. Through one of his younger brothers, however, Mao was able to stay in touch with other Communist leaders in southern Jiangxi, some of whom later brought their own surviving forces to join him at Jinggangshan.
The following year of 1928 marked yet another turning point in Mao’s life. He was now cut off from virtually all the sources of authority and all normal career tracks that he had experienced before. He had lost his Party titles from both the Communists and the Guomindang, and a member of the Hunan Communist Party provincial committee who made his way into the Jinggang mountains in March even told Mao—wrongly, it turned out—that Mao had been deprived of his Party membership. He was with peasants, but few of those he was with can have come from his home region of Xiangxiang or Xiangtan, and the harsh mountain terrain was indescribably different from the lusher valley rice-growing regions in which he grew up. His secret-society allies may have had some Communist sympathies, but the rules with which they ran their mountain world were their own. When Mao was forced, on Party orders, to lead some of his troops down into the plains, they suffered serious reverses and he soon pulled back to his mountain base. On at least one occasion he flatly rejected an order that he make another such military sortie. In a brief report of May 1928 to the Jiangxi provincial committee, Mao gave his “permanent mailing address” as being care of the secret-society leaders in the border mountain region—there was no other way to reach him.
In that same report, Mao mentioned that he and his forces were using the Jiangxi county town of Yongxin as their new “center,” and as a base for organizing “insurrections” in the neighboring counties. They needed such a base to bring some order to their motley forces—Mao described his followers as being “a mass of ten thousand messy people with very poor discipline”—and also to develop Party organization, raise money, and make clothes. Yongxin had been a rural revolutionary center since April 1927, when a Communist government was established there. Among well-known local radicals elected to the revolutionary county committee were three younger members of the prominent scholarly and landlord He family, two sisters and a brother, who had all joined the Communist Party the year before, when the Northern Expedition forces were seeking to reunify China. Later the He family joined up with the bandits in Jinggangshan. One of the sisters, He Zizhen, now nineteen, and as famous for her looks as for her spirit, met Mao in the mountains. Mao was thirty-four, lean from privation, rich with experience from his organizational work among the peasantry, and a storehouse of knowledge about Communist and Guomindang Party leaders. He was now living to the fullest—if not entirely by his own choice—that heroic wandering knight-errant life of which he had written to Yang Kaihui in his poem of 1923. Apparently his memories of his wife and small children were fading; in any case, he was trapped in the mountains by opposing armies and had no way of getting to Changsha, nor had Yang Kaihui any way of leaving home and coming to the mountains to join him. A poem Yang Kaihui wrote to Mao in October 1928 reflected her sorrow and frustration at their separation, and at the impossibility of getting messages through to him. She hoped that he had adequate winter clothes, and worried over a foot injury he had sustained before going up into the mountains. She worried, too, over his sleeping far away, uncherished and alone. But by the time she wrote her poem, He Zizhen and Mao were lovers, and their first child was born in 1929.
Contradictory instructions from the Party center and from the Hunan provincial network continued to reach Mao, and the poverty of the Jinggangshan region, its instability, and the shifting numbers of not always reliable troops, made consistent policy difficult. But in the mountains Mao followed an extremely radical policy, one fully attuned both to the insights he had gathered in examining peasant violence in Hunan and to those aspects of Comintern policy that emphasized peasant extremism (as they often but not invariably did). The “land law” of Jinggangshan, as promulgated by Mao in December 1928, stipulated that
all
land should be confiscated from the wealthy, with most of it being distributed directly to the individual peasants, some tilled in common, and some kept for “model farms.” After the land redistribution, except for the old, the very young, and the sick, “the rest of the population must be compelled to work.” (So had Lord Shang ordered for the subjects of Qin, twenty-five hundred years before, as Mao had written in his first surviving schoolboy essay.) Hillsides with edible-oil plants were to be divided among the peasants, but the revolutionary government would control all bamboo forests. A flat land tax of 15 percent would be levied in most cases. Members of the Red Army would get the same land distributions as other peasants, but in their case the revolutionary government would hire laborers to work the land for the soldiers on duty. Problems among the troops, however, were omnipresent and almost overwhelming. There was no cold-weather clothing, no drugs or medicines to treat the wounded, almost no money for food, and very little arms or ammunition. It was only through the spirit of “democracy”—sharing the hardships equally, across all levels—that the situation could be maintained. Guerrilla action against the enemy was the most successful—to attack only when in superior strength and to avoid needless “dispersion” of the troops at all costs.