Moscow had reservations about Mao. Chou En-lai, the key figure at the Congress, said in his military report that Mao’s troops had “a partly bandit character,” meaning that Mao did not always toe the line. Yet, fundamentally, Mao was in favor with Moscow, and was cited at the Congress as a key fighting leader. The fact was that he was the most effective man in applying the Kremlin’s policy which, as Stalin reiterated to the Chinese Party leaders in person on 9 June, was to establish a Red Army. While in Russia, every delegate to the Congress received army training, and detailed military plans were drawn up. Stalin, the old bank-robber, got personally involved in the financing via a huge counterfeiting operation.
Mao fitted Stalin’s bill. He had an army — and a base — and was an old Party member. Moreover, he now had the highest profile, even if of a notorious kind, among all Chinese Communists. He was, as Stalin was later to say to the Yugoslavs, insubordinate, but a winner. And however disobedient he might be, Mao clearly needed the Party, and needed Moscow, and this made him essentially subject to control.
Mao’s demands were met in full. By November he had been told that he was in charge of the Zhu — Mao Red Army and its territory around the outlaw land. This was a key moment in his rise. He had faced down the Party — and Moscow itself.
This mutiny entered myth as a purely Chinese operation under the misleading name of “the Nanchang Uprising,” and 1 August was later designated the founding day of the Chinese Communist Army. But, as Stalin bluntly put it, the operation was “on the initiative of the Comintern, and only on its initiative.” These words were deleted from the published version of Stalin’s speech. The man in charge of delivering arms to the mutineers was Anastas Mikoyan.
One of Mao’s closest subordinates confirmed that by the time Mao turned up, “the Autumn Harvest Uprising had failed.”
One of the Russians in Shanghai told Moscow that “everything has been given over to fire and the sword and people were shot right and left.”
He praised Lenin, not inappositely, with these words: “His law has no detail. It just kills all opposition. His workers and peasants can just kill off all the landed tyrants, bad gentry, landlords, capitalists, with no need to report to anyone …” The regime called on people to “disembowel and slice off heads … slaughter on the spot with no hesitation. Have absolutely not a shred of feeling …,” “kill, kill freely. To kill is the topmost important work in an uprising.” Children were praised for “automatically killing reactionaries.”
6. SUBJUGATING THE RED ARMY SUPREMO (1928–30 AGE 34–36)
MAO RECEIVED Shanghai’s endorsement as head of the Zhu — Mao Army in November 1928, and at once began planning to leave the outlaw land with the army, to take over new domains and new armed forces. He was also leaving because the region was about to be attacked. In June that year, Chiang Kai-shek had defeated the Peking government and brought much of China under his control, setting up his capital in Nanjing. Chiang’s troops were on their way to Mao’s territory. Mao set off on 14 January 1929. The bulk of the Zhu — Mao Army, now some 3,000 strong, left with him, as did Zhu De, whom Shanghai had appointed military supremo of the army.
Fifteen months after his arrival, Mao left behind a depleted land. In his first experience of running a base he had shown that he had no economic strategy but looting, tantamount to “slash and burn.” A Party inspector wrote to Shanghai:
Before the Red Army came … there was quite an atmosphere of peaceful and happy existence … the peasants … had quite enough to live on … Since the Red Army came, things were totally changed. Because the Red Army’s sole income was robbing the rich … because even petty bourgeois, rich peasants and small pedlars were all treated as enemies, and because after great destruction, no attention was paid to construction or to the economic crisis, the countryside is totally bankrupt, and is collapsing by the day.
Mao’s men had bled the place dry, and the locals loathed them. When he departed, he left behind his wounded and the civilian Communists. Those captured by the regular government army were lucky — they were merely machine-gunned to death. Those who fell into the hands of local forces were disemboweled, burned alive, or slashed slowly to death. Many hundreds were killed.
A report to Shanghai by the stay-behind Party committee revealed that the bitterness bequeathed by Mao’s regime was so intense that even the Nationalists “burning houses and killing ring-leaders did not generate hatred from the average masses for the reactionaries.” People were defecting when they could: those “under our Red power naturally do not dare to act reactionary,” the report stated. “But the masses outside [our control] are crossing over to the Nationalists en masse.” The report blamed the locals, saying that they “have always been no good.”
The original outlaws, who were mostly locals and stayed behind, fared much better. Most of them survived — including the two chiefs, Yuan and Zuo. However, these two met their deaths a year later, in March 1930—at the hands of Communists who returned to the area. Moscow had ordered the CCP to double-cross those it termed “bandits”—in effect, to use them and then kill them. “Alliance with bandits and other similar groups is only applicable before an uprising,” stated one resolution. “Afterwards you must disarm them and severely suppress them … Their leaders must be regarded as leaders of counter-revolutionaries, even if they helped uprisings. And these leaders must all be completely eliminated.”
Yuan and Zuo’s followers fled back into the depths of the mountains and became fiercely anti-Communist. A Red search unit reported that “the local population resented us, and did everything to protect the [outlaws].” Having lived under both the bandits and the Communists, the locals knew which they preferred.
ON THE JOURNEY out of the outlaw land, Mao loped along, cracking jokes to his entourage. He had cause to be cheerful. Shanghai and Moscow’s acceptance of his demands showed that he could get his way. Indeed, at that very moment, January 1929, in Moscow, GRU chief Jan Berzin and Stalin’s China apparatchik, Pavel Mif, were meeting to discuss how the Soviet army could give “practical help to Zhu — Mao,” whom Moscow was tracking closely. This is the first known occasion when Moscow was arranging military aid specifically for the Mao — Zhu force, now publicly described as “the most formidable among the Communists.”
Government forces were in hot pursuit, and Mao’s army had to fight pitched battles, in one of which Zhu De’s wife was captured. Later she was executed and her head stuck on a pole in Changsha. It was during this low point in Zhu’s fortunes that Mao mounted a power grab against him. Within two weeks of leaving the outlaw land, Mao had abolished Zhu De’s post as military supremo, awarded by Shanghai, and concentrated all power in his own hands. As the Red force was being attacked by the Nationalists, Zhu did not retaliate. He was no match for Mao in exploiting a crisis.
Mao did not inform Shanghai about his seizure of power. Instead he wrote to tell Shanghai how glad he was to submit to Party orders. “How should the Red Army proceed?” he wrote. “We particularly thirst for instructions. Please could you send them winging my way?” “The resolutions of the 6th Congress are extremely correct. We accept them jumping for joy.” “In the future, we hope the Centre gives us a letter every month.” Mao was currying favor with Shanghai hoping that when they got wind of his coup against Zhu De, they would be better disposed towards him.
Still, Zhu De refrained from exposing Mao. Zhu had no craving for power, nor any gift for intrigue. And since reporting to Shanghai was the job of the chief, to write himself would amount to declaring war on Mao.