Mao’s main preoccupation, inevitably, was preserving what was left of the Communist organization and deepening his own hold on Party power. The rhetoric of hostility to Japan was easy to construct, and sincere. Japan had brought untold problems to China since the war of 1894-95, and in the 1930s had been strengthening its grip over the whole of Manchuria by means of the puppet state “Manchukuo,” nominally controlled by the abdicated last emperor of the Qing dynasty, Henry Puyi, but in reality run by the Japanese army and the huge bureaucracy of the Japanese South Manchurian Railway and related businesses. But implementing an effective anti-Japanese policy was a far more difficult problem. Chiang Kai-shek, in a similar situation, had opted for wiping out the Communists before focusing his armies on defeat of the Japanese. The Communists accordingly developed the counterstrategy of urging the whole of China to unite in opposition to the Japanese, and to end the fratricidal civil war of Chinese against Chinese.
A heaven-sent opportunity for the Communists occurred in December 1936. Chiang Kai-shek flew in to Xian—the capital of Shaanxi province—in an attempt to coordinate a final all-out campaign of annihilation against Mao and the Communist survivors.. To accomplish this, Chiang needed the total support of the former warlord of Manchuria, Zhang Xueliang, who had been forced out of his homeland by the Japanese occupation in the northeast but still controlled a large and effective military force. In a startling move, instead of agreeing to fight alongside the Nationalists, General Zhang orchestrated a secret coup whereby Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped in the middle of the night of December 12 and held under arrest, pending the inauguration of some fully articulated program of unified Chinese resistance against Japan. The Communists had been wooing Zhang Xueliang for some time, trying to win him over to their cause, but there is no evidence that they were privy to all the details of the coup. Nevertheless the seizure of Chiang Kai-shek gave them a chance to size up their options: to have Chiang killed, on the grounds that he had long been their implacable enemy; to use him as a bargaining chip to buy time for themselves to push their social programs; to pressure him to withdraw all his troops from Shaanxi; to release him after obtaining agreement on a United Front against Japan.
Mao, who had just been elected to the crucial position of chairman of the Communist Military Council, in addition to his position on the Politburo, had a central role to play in this debate. After tense discussions within the Party Center, with General Zhang, and with Moscow, the Party decided on a modified form of the last option: to strengthen the United Front. Their statement, released on December 19, managed to combine a tone that was both formally polite and yet slightly mocking. Some of this tone recalls the earlier Mao of the pre-Jiangxi Soviet days, as it addressed the Guomindang leaders and their various warlord allies as “respected gentlemen,” and pointed out that in anti-Japanese actions, “the pace of the gentlemen from Nanjing has been rather slow.” But the brief heart of the document was all business: establish a cease-fire line between the Communists and the Nationalists; immediately convene a peace conference of “all parties, groups, social strata, and armies”—including the Communists—to meet in Nanjing; let a wide range of views be heard on “the issue of making arrangements for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek,” as long as the basic priorities of national unification and resistance to Japan were adhered to; and move fast, “so as to prevent the Japanese bandits from sneaking in at this time of national confusion!”
Chiang Kai-shek refused to make the formal public statement supporting a United Front and end to the civil war that the Communists had hoped for, but he did imply that he would change his current policies, and his release on Christmas Day, 1936, was heralded by the Chinese as evidence that the deadlock was over and that some kind of new anti-Japanese alliance would emerge. In January 1937, Mao and the Party Center debated the correct propaganda line that they should take, and decided to hammer away publicly at a few major issues: the Communist Party itself would deny all prior knowledge of the kidnapping and treat it as entirely “an internal matter of the Guomindang Nanjing government.” The Communist Party had always wanted a peaceful solution to the impasse and hence did not issue any formal endorsement of General Zhang Xueliang. It nevertheless hoped Zhang would be appointed to lead his own troops along with those of other western warlords—who of course threatened the frail Communist base area—into a major confrontation with Japan. If Chiang refused to do this, and civil war resumed, he would be “solely responsible.” This remained the basic Communist approach until Japanese provocations during the “Marco Polo Bridge incident” near Beijing, on July 7, 1937, induced Chiang Kai-shek at last to order a unified national resistance to Japan, in which the Communists would also join. In expressing total “enthusiasm” for this war, the Communists reminded the Chinese people—in language that might have drawn both sighs and sardonic smiles—that “our party has long since shown in word and deed an open, selfless attitude and a readiness to compromise for the common good, which has won the commendation of all.”
Mao in Yan‘an could hail the war with “enthusiasm,” partly because his base area was well insulated from the most desperate areas of the fighting. That took place between the Japanese army and the regular military forces of the Nationalists’ Guomindang armies on the north China plain, in Shanghai, and along the Yangtze River. Especially in protracted fighting around Shanghai, the Nationalists suffered immense losses. After the terrible “rape of Nanjing” by the Japanese on December 7,1937, brought a literal and symbolic end to any myths of Guomindang power in their own capital city, what was left of the main Nationalist forces retreated up the Yangtze River, first to Wuhan and then, when that fell in the summer of 1938, even deeper inland to Chongqing. Thereafter a good deal of the fighting in central China was waged by scattered units of those Communists who had been left behind at the time of the Long March, or the remnants of various other Soviet governments that had coexisted with the Jiangxi Soviet. In the major cities (including Shanghai) the Communist Party fought a clandestine underground war against the Japanese, often at the same time as Nationalist secret agents and their secret-society allies.
In northern China, after the Nationalist retreat, the main brunt of anti-Japanese action was borne by a sprawling Soviet region to the east of Mao’s Yan‘an base, which covered parts of the provinces of Shanxi, Chahar, and Hebei. This base was within the reach of aggressive Japanese commanders, and fighting there was vicious, with no quarter given by either side. In both north China and central China (as previously in Manchukuo) the Japanese set up puppet regimes under nominal Chinese control, with collaborationist troops and police to control the local population, hunt down Communists, and collect taxes. Hundreds of millions of Chinese had little choice but to live under one of the collaborationist regimes; of those who chose to leave their homes and jobs, a majority trekked south and west to join the Nationalists in Chongqing or in the new “United University” that had been formed in Yunnan province by the students and faculty of various prestigious Beijing and Shanghai colleges. Tens of thousands, however, made the equally arduous trek to the north, seeing Yan’an as a place where their talents would be most needed, and Mao as a leader who could focus China’s resistance to Japan more effectively than Chiang Kai-shek.
Mao’s completion of the Long March, and the factional battles he had fought there, had brought him a leadership position in the Party, but it was by no means unchallenged. His rivals within the Party were numerous and determined, and were constantly refighting the ideological battles of the past in an attempt to apportion blame for prior catastrophes. Mao himself had done this on the Long March, in Zunyi, but in Yan‘an the arguments became sharper and more formal. One of Mao’s rivals pointed out that though there had been successes in the development of the Red Army, and in the confiscation and redistribution of land, the negative side of the equation was far stronger: “In the white areas, in the cities, and among the workers, we have suffered great losses. Not only did we fail to build up our own forces or prepare for the uprising, but we were tremendously weakened organizationally. Hundreds of thousands of Party members lost their lives. Moreover, tens of thousands of our people are still imprisoned by the Guomindang.” Because of “the immaturity and low theoretical level of the Party,” the critic continued, the factional struggles within the Party were deeply damaging. Party behavior was “exactly like someone who, never having drunk before, downs a bottle of brandy the first time he touches liquor.... The popular term is overkill.” Such arguments were historical and technical, but they focused on many of the kinds of policies that Mao had followed in his more extreme moments. Only a few months later, in November, a large group of Russian-trained Chinese Communists returned to Yan’an, and Mao once again found himself involved in swirling levels of technical debate and analysis.
To hold his own in such dangerous eddies, Mao had to sharpen his grasp of Communist dialectic. Though he had of necessity read some Marxist-Leninist literature, he had never received any formal training, either in Party schools or overseas. With his decision, first made in December 1935, to openly challenge the returnees from the Soviet Union, Mao would have to undertake systematic study. Visitors to his cave noted that he was using this post-Long March respite to read books on economics and philosophy. Mao also took other steps to increase his self-image within the Party. On June 22, 1937, for the first time in Mao’s life, a portrait of him was published; it appeared in the revolutionary Yan‘an newspaper
Liberation.
Mao was shown full face, with a background of troops marching under waving banners. Mao’s face, in the picture, was illuminated by the rays of the sun, while under the portrait was printed one of his “sayings,” calling for liberation of the Chinese nation and society. In the fall of 1937, young supporters of Mao began to compile a collection of Mao’s short works for publication, with an adulatory essay. No Chinese Communist leader’s works had ever been published in this way.
Also during that spring and summer of 1937, Mao gave a short series of lectures on dialectical materialism to students in the revolutionary university, though he admitted that he himself had only just begun to study the problem (and later scholars have shown the lectures were plagiarized from Chinese translations of some Soviet essays on Marxism). What is original about the lectures, however, is that they show Mao beginning to grope for a way to adjust Marxist philosophy to certain realities in the Chinese situation, just as Lenin had adjusted it to certain Russian realities. But this idea was presented only in a fragmentary and incomplete way.
If Mao was to become the accepted leader of his Party, he not only had to win on the battlefield and have successful policies for rural and urban revolution, he also had to be able to hold his own as a theorist. It was as a theorist that he most needed help, and this is where he got it. In the summer of 1937, slightly ahead of the main exodus of students fleeing after the Marco Polo Bridge disaster, a young lecturer named Chen Boda, from “China University” in Beijing, made his way to Yan‘an. Born in 1904, Chen was a decade younger than Mao, and was raised in an impoverished peasant family in Fujian province. But he later studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy in Moscow for several years and became fluent in the Russian language. Returning to China in 1931, Chen became a teacher of early Chinese history and philosophy before making his way to Yan’an. Since Chen wrote Chinese with great elegance and showed extraordinary ability to apply knowledge of dialectics to the study of the past, Mao made Chen his secretary, with responsibility for drafting his essays and speeches. Aware of Chen’s ideological skills and strong Russian background, Mao also named Chen head of research in the Communist Propaganda Bureau. This was followed by an appointment at the Yan‘an central Party school, to supervise research there into Chinese problems.
Chen Boda was to become an essential ideological ally and guide to Mao. The Soviet returnees’ intentions could be clearly gauged when they pushed for the rapid convocation of a Seventh Communist Party Congress in China. There had been no such assembly since the Sixth Communist Party Congress, held in Moscow in 1928. Decisions made at a new full congress would of course have power to override any further rapid and ad hoc decisions on Party leadership, such as those made at Zunyi on the Long March. Such a full congress could also prove a forum for reopening vindictive debates about Communist military policy, in which Mao had consistently argued for (and practiced when he could) a policy of guerrilla warfare in which the enemy would be lured deep into Communist-controlled terrain, forced to fragment their forces, and then attacked with overwhelming force in swift, isolated engagements. The convening of the congress was successfully (from Mao’s point of view) delayed, and in July 1938 Chen Boda published the first of many articles that gave careful ideological support and justification to Mao’s policies. By 1939, Chen was developing a series of intellectual arguments to show how Mao had successfully, in his writings, moved from the role of thinker and activist to the all-important sphere of “theorist.” In this sense, though of course not in that of overt ideological content, Chen presented Mao’s role as the new theorist of the Communist revolution as being parallel to the role of Confucius as the theorist for the “feudal” Zhou dynasty of the first millennium B.C.E. Just as Confucius caught the ideological heart of his age in his writings, said Chen, so did Mao in his Hunan report of 1927 catch the “essence” of an “entire historical period.”
As Chen Boda was thus helping Mao construct an edifice of ideological dominance, Mao was also struggling with the task of keeping Yan‘an a viable economic and political base. Shaanxi was very different from anyplace Mao had lived in before, and its poverty, exacerbated by the Japanese war and also by a partial Guomindang blockade of the Yan’an region, stretched Communist ingenuity to the limits. Indeed, at times the Yan‘an leaders brought farmworkers into Yan’an from outlying areas to work on major irrigation projects and open up new lands, so that statistically the region could appear to be making swift strides forward. There was also the vast influx of new recruits to the Communist camp to be considered, and ideological techniques had to be devised to prove—and to develop—their loyalty.