Mao Zedong Page 9

  Mao’s career and Party standing fluctuated violently during these years. Much of the time, as titular “chairman” of the provisional Soviet area government, he was the signatory of major Party documents and the convener of meetings, which now had to deal not only with land, labor, and the problem of the militarists, but also with the emerging menace of Japan, which had attacked Shanghai in early 1932 and had taken over the whole of Manchuria. Anti-Japanese nationalism was a potent factor in the Communist Party’s recruitment drives, particularly among the patriotic students. But especially after the senior Communist leadership were forced to abandon Shanghai because of the unrelenting Guomindang police pressure there, and moved to the Jiangxi Soviet, Mao found himself on the sidelines, or else had his recommendations completely overruled. On one occasion he was removed from a committee chairmanship in the middle of a meeting.

  On several occasions during this period, Mao took “sick leave,” as he had in the past. Undoubtedly, some of these absences were political ones, and others were more in the nature of compassionate leave—as when He Zizhen had their second child in 1932, which was delivered in a Fujian hospital by a Communist doctor who had once worked with Mao in Jinggangshan. This child, a boy, they named Anhong. Mao and He Zizhen had left their first child, a daughter, with a rural couple in Fujian, so that she would be safe from the fighting, but she died as an infant. Their third child, born in 1933, seems also to have died in infancy. Mao had health problems, too. The malaria that had troubled him before returned for a while, and in late 1932 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, and spent several months in a Fujian sanatorium in the Soviet area before the disease was checked. On various occasions, too, he retreated to isolated scenic sites in the hills with He Zizhen; “bodyguards” were assigned to accompany them, though whether the guards were meant to protect them in case of enemy attack, or constituted a thinly veiled type of house arrest ordered by Mao’s rivals within the Communist Party, is not clear. From April to October 1934, though Mao was technically still chairman of the border region government, he and He Zizhen lived together with their baby son in a hillside temple in what was described as “almost complete isolation.”

  During this period, the attacks from Chiang Kai-shek’s forces became so relentless that the Communist Party leadership decided, secretly, that they would have to abandon their base. Mao was not involved in the planning of this all-important event in Chinese Communist history, the first step in what was later to be called “the Long March.” He and his wife joined the great column of some 86,000 fleeing Communist troops and supporters only as it passed near their residence on October 18. About 15,000 Communist troops had been ordered to stay behind in the Soviet, to protect the approximately 10,000 sick or wounded soldiers who could not make the march and to guard the civilian population as well as they could. Mao insisted to Party leaders that He Zizhen—who was once again pregnant—be allowed to make the march with him. There was only a handful of other women on the march, mainly the wives or companions of senior Party leaders, but the couple were not allowed to take their two-year-old son, Anhong, with them. So they entrusted him to Mao’s younger brother Mao Zetan, who was among those staying with the rearguard group. When Zetan in turn had to go away on combat duty, he left the two-year-old with one of his bodyguards. Mao Zetan was subsequently killed in the fighting—in 1935—and the boy was never heard of again.

  The Long March, later presented as a great achievement in Communist history, was a nightmare of death and pain while it was in progress. The huge column was bogged down with equipment, party files, weaponry, communications equipment, and whatever else had been salvaged from Jiangxi to help them in setting up a new base area. A devastating attack by the Guomindang artillery and air force as the slow-moving column was trying to cross the Xiang River in northern Guangxi province, took close to half their number in casualties. But the march continued, even though there was no agreement on exactly where they were heading, or even on which direction they should take. The leaders, however, had reached a tacit understanding that when they reached Zunyi, a prosperous city in Guizhou province, they would pause and take stock.

  The “Enlarged Meeting of the Politburo” as it was termed, assembled in Zunyi on January 15, 1935, in a crisis atmosphere. Party policy had clearly been disastrous, and the very survival of the revolutionary movement hung in the balance. It was a time both to apportion blame for what had gone wrong and—more important—decide what to do in the immediate future, and who was to lead the Party in doing it. Present at the meetings were seventeen veteran leaders of the Party, including Mao, one Comintern representative, Otto Braun, one interpreter (for Braun), and a notetaker—the thirty-year-old Deng Xiaoping. In terms of assigning blame, the meeting faulted Braun and two of the Chinese Communist leaders for adopting an overly static defense in the Jiangxi Soviet, one relying often on positional warfare and the construction of blockhouses, rather than on swift deployment and mobile warfare, in which superior Communist strength could have been focused on points of Guomindang weakness. Lack of imagination by the same leaders, the majority concluded, made them miss their chance of linking up with a rebellion of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops that broke out in Fujian during 1933. As to immediate goals, the Party should drop the idea of having a base in Guizhou, and instead should cross the Yangtze River and set up a new base in Sichuan province. In terms of Party leadership, there had indeed been “erroneous leadership,” but there was “not a split in the Party.” The “Group of Three” who had been coordinating the Long March up to this point was abolished, and Mao was named to the Standing Committee of the Politburo and given the additional title of “military assistant.” Otto Braun, the Chinese minutes noted, “totally and firmly rejected the criticism of himself.”

  The Zunyi meetings gave a major boost to Mao’s prestige, and it is to this time period that one can date his move toward a commanding position within the Party leadership. But many major problems still had not been resolved. It turned out to be impossible to create the Sichuan base, since Guomindang troops and local militarists kept the Communists from crossing the Yangtze, and after circling aimlessly around Guizhou province for several months, often under fierce enemy attack, they had to swing far down into the south before turning north again along the Tibetan border and heading for their final destination, the sparsely populated northwestern province of Shaanxi. Also, there were still many other major Communist military leaders who were opposed to Mao and saw no reason to risk their own troops for his protection. Some of these commanders not only abandoned Mao and established new base areas of their own, but even lured away some of Mao’s finest commanders, so that Mao’s forces steadily shrank despite his formal rise in Party status. Finally, in personal terms, there were tragedies. He Zizhen was almost killed in a bombing raid and was left badly injured, with shrapnel embedded in her body in more than a dozen places. Though she subsequently gave birth, to a girl, because of the dangers and pressures of the campaign the baby had to be left with a local peasant family. The girl was thereafter never found, and was the fourth of the children He Zizhen had with Mao Zedong that was lost to them.

  During the fall of 1935, Mao’s greatly diminished forces endured a hellish march through the swamplands and mountains of Qinghai and Gansu, where their main enemies, apart from grim skirmishes with the local tribespeople, were intense hunger—there was almost no food to be either bought or foraged—the constant damp, and freezing temperatures at night. Many of the remaining 15,000 or so people in the column died of malnutrition, suppurating sores, or by eating poisonous weeds and berries. Only between 7,000 and 8,000 of the column survived, reaching the village of Wayabao in Shaanxi, just south of the Great Wall, in October 1935, and joining forces with some other Communist troops who had already made a base there.

  It had been an exhausting and astonishing year since they left Jiangxi, and now Mao had to chart out in his mind a new course for the Communists and for his own career. He was also to be a father again.
He Zizhen became pregnant for the fifth time after the March ended, and their daughter Li Min was born in the Shaanxi village of Baoan in the late summer of 1936. “The Maos were proud parents of a new baby girl,” as Edgar Snow, the first Westerner ever to interview Mao, jotted in his notes at that time. As had not been the case with any of He Zizhen’s other children, she and Mao—though separated—were to see Li Min grow up to maturity, marry, and raise two children of her own. Fate granted them at least that measure of continuity.

  7

  Crafting the Image

  AFTER SOME HUNTING AROUND in Shaanxi for the most practical and defensible location, by the fall of 1936 the Communists had decided to make their headquarters in Yan‘an, a fair-sized market town, with good shelter nearby in the cave dwellings that peasants for centuries had built into the soft loess hillsides. Such dwellings were cheap to build and gave good protection from the extremes of heat and cold that afflicted this arid region. And in a countryside almost barren of trees, the need for timber was reduced to some simple framing for a rough screen and door that would shelter the cave dwellers from wind, dust, and the gaze of the outside world.

  The fact that Mao lived in such a cave struck visitors to Yan‘an as symbolic of his revolutionary simplicity and fervor. In fact, it was an adjustment to circumstances, of a kind he had made many times before in his life, and Mao settled at once into this strangely desolate new home. He had after all lived for most of his life with none of the amenities of the modernizing urban world, though he had tasted them in Shanghai and Canton. He had time, too, to enjoy the company of his new daughter and to relish the news that Communists in Shanghai had been able to track down two of the children he had had with Yang Kaihui long before—Anying, who was now fourteen, and Anqing, who was thirteen. However, their youngest brother had died some time in those bleak years, and Anqing’s health had been badly damaged by his privations. The boys would be sent to Yan’an as soon as it could be safely arranged.

  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 Japane
se, 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.