Removing Min-fan was Mao’s first power struggle. And he won. Under Mao, there was no Party committee. Meetings were rare. There was just Mao giving orders, though he took care to report regularly to Shanghai, as required.
MAO WAS DOING NOTHING about another major task, which was to organize labor unions. He felt no more sympathy for workers than he did for peasants. Writing to a friend in November 1920, in which he complained about his own conditions as an intellectual, he remarked: “I think labourers in China do not really suffer poor physical conditions. Only scholars suffer.”
In December 1921, workers in Anyuan, an important mining center straddling the Hunan — Jiangxi border, wrote asking the Communists for help, and Mao went up to the mine — the first time on record that he went near any workers. He stayed a few days and then left, delegating the practical work to someone else. After this brief dip in the grimy world of the coal miners, he told Shanghai that he had come “to his wits’ end” with “the workers organisation.”
There were effective labor organizers around, though, especially two non-Communists who founded a Hunan Labor Union and recruited more than 3,000 of the approximately 7,000 workers in Changsha. The two were arrested in January 1922 while leading a big strike. In the small hours, they were executed — hacked to death in the traditional manner, an event that gave rise to a storm of protest nationwide. When the governor who killed them was later asked why he did not target Mao, his answer was that he had not seen Mao as a threat.
IT WAS THANKS TO HIS ineffectiveness at organizing labor and recruiting that Mao was dropped from the Party’s 2nd Congress in July 1922. This was a most important occasion, as it passed a charter and endorsed joining the Comintern, thus formally accepting outright Moscow control. Later, Mao tried to explain away his absence by claiming that he “intended to attend” but “forgot the name of the place where it was to be held, could not find any comrades, and missed it.” In fact, Mao knew plenty of Party people in Shanghai, including some of the delegates, and there was no chance that he could have accidentally missed what was a very formal occasion. His absence from the congress meant that he might lose his position as the Party boss in Hunan. Russian funds would no longer come through him, and he would have to take orders from someone else. This prospect spurred him to act: first he visited a lead and zinc mine in April 1922, and in May he went back to Anyuan, the coal-mining center. He also led a number of demonstrations and strikes. On 24 October, when Kai-hui gave birth to their first child, a son, Mao was not with her, as he was away negotiating on behalf of the builders’ union. He gave their son the name An-ying: An was a generation name; ying meant “an outstanding person.”
Mao also finally set up a Hunan Party committee at the end of May, a year after being made Hunan boss. It had thirty members, most of them not recruited by himself. The future president, Liu Shao-chi, described on his deathbed how the committee worked under Mao. “I had many meetings at Chairman Mao’s house,” he wrote, “and apart from asking questions, I had no chance to speak at all. In the end, it was always what Chairman Mao said that went … the Party in Hunan already had its own leader and its own distinctive style — different from the Party in Shanghai.” Liu was putting on record as explicitly as he could that Mao had already started behaving dictatorially in the earliest days of the Party.
Meanwhile, as Mao worked to mend fences with the center of power, he had a lucky break. In January 1923 most of the CCP cadres working in Shanghai found themselves at odds with an order from Moscow to do something seemingly bizarre, and arbitrary: to join another political party, the Nationalists (also known as the Kuomintang, or KMT). Moscow needed provincial Communists who would support its position — and found Mao.
THE NATIONALIST PARTY had been founded in 1912 by the merger of a number of Republican groups. Its leader was Sun Yat-sen, who had briefly been the first provisional president of the Republic, before losing power to the army chief Yuan Shih-kai. Since then, Sun had been trying to form his own army and overthrow the Peking government.
This objective led Sun to embrace Moscow. The Russians shared his goal of subverting the Peking government, as it was refusing its consent to their occupation of Outer Mongolia, which was then Chinese territory. The CCP was far too small to topple the Peking government, so Moscow’s envoys looked round among various provincial potentates, and found that the only one willing to accept the Soviet presence was Sun.
Sun was based in Canton, the capital of the southern coastal province of Guangdong. He asked the Russians to help him build a force strong enough to conquer China. In September 1922 he told a Russian envoy that he wanted to establish “an army with arms and military matériel supplies from Russia.” In return, as well as endorsing the Soviet occupation of Outer Mongolia, Sun proposed that Russia occupy the huge mineral-rich province of Xinjiang in the northwest. Russia’s chief envoy, Adolf Joffe, reported in November that Sun “asks that one of our divisions should take Xinjiang … where there are only 4,00 °Chinese troops and there cannot be any resistance.” He suggested to the Russians that they invade from Xinjiang deep into the heartland of China, as far as Chengdu in Sichuan, on his behalf.
Not only did Sun have big ambitions and few scruples, he had a sizable party with thousands of registered members, and a territorial base with a major seaport at Canton. So in early January 1923 the Soviet Politburo decided: “Give full backing to the Nationalists,” with “money [from] the reserve funds of the Comintern.” The decision was signed by the up-and-coming Stalin, who had begun to take a close interest in China. Sun had thus become, as Joffe told Lenin, “our man” (italics in original). His price was “2 million Mexican dollars maximum,” roughly 2 million gold rubles. “Isn’t all this worth 2 million roubles?” Joffe asked.
Moscow knew that Sun had his own agenda, and was trying to use Russia, just as Russia was trying to use him. It wanted its local client, the CCP, to be right there on the spot to ensure that Sun toed Moscow’s line and served Moscow’s interest. So it ordered the Chinese Communists to join the Nationalist Party. In a secret session, Stalin spelled out: “we cannot give directives out of here, Moscow, openly. We do this through the Communist Party of China and other comrades in camera, confidentially …”
Moscow wanted to use the CCP as a Trojan horse to manipulate the much bigger Nationalist Party; but all CCP leaders, starting from Professor Chen, opposed joining Sun’s party, on the grounds that it rejected communism and that Sun was just another “lying,” “unscrupulous” politician out for power. Moscow was told that sponsoring Sun was “wasting the blood and sweat of Russia, and perhaps the blood and sweat of the world proletariat.”
Maring, the Comintern envoy, faced a revolt. This is almost certainly why Mao was brought to Party HQ. The pragmatic Mao embraced Moscow’s strategy. He promptly joined the Nationalist Party himself. A more fervent Communist, actually an old friend of Mao’s, Cai He-sen, told the Comintern that when Maring put forward the slogan “All work for the Nationalists,” “its [only] supporter was Mao.”