How the Communist Party Survived and Endured
Mao Zedong, Li Lisan and the 28 Bolsheviks All Competed for Power. Mao's Second Wife Paid the Ultimate Price.
Last time, we saw conflict between Chiang Kai-shek, his bankers and an attempt to engage his Nationalist party in mass movements, with Deng Yanda in charge. This episode, we’ll look at conflict within the Chinese Communist movement.
Mao Zedong was in the countryside, observing and learning. That was a comfortable place for Mao. His father had been a rich peasant. A farmer who raised pigs, grew and processed rice and sold them in markets. Mao’s father was thrifty and his operations profitable. Mao’s father was able to reacquire land Mao’s grandfather had pawned and even to acquire more land. Later, when their father died, Mao and his brothers inherited the properties. It was because of his father’s support that Mao was able to start his education. Mao loved reading and he loved his mother, but not his father. He was rebellious from a young age and was expelled or asked to leave at least three schools for being headstrong. His father hit him and later during the Cultural Revolution, Mao said he wished he could have tortured his father in the way that was happening them, by “jet planing”. That is when a prisoner’s arms are pulled back behind the body while the head pushed down.
Once when Mao’s father had humiliated him by calling him useless and lazy in front of guests, Mao ran away. His father chased him and ordered him back in the house. But Mao ran to a pond and threatened to drown himself. It worked. As Mao later recalled, “Old men like him didn’t want to lose their sons. That is their weakness. I attacked at their weak point, and I won!”
At one point, Mao’s father cut off money for his education. He wanted Zedong to settle down and be responsible. So, the father arranged a marriage for Zedong and would pay for his education again once he was married. Zedong was 14 years old when he married for the first time in 1908. She had no name of her own. She was just referred to as Woman Luo, since her family name was Luo. Just over a year later, she died.
Mao like most intellectuals in the Republic of China came to oppose arranged marriages and to argue against them. I hope to do an episode on women in the Communist Party and my plan is to go deeper into this topic in that episode.
Mao studied in the provincial capital of Changsha. His thoughts and work from that time still exist. He put a lot of his student thoughts down on paper. Here is something Mao Zedong wrote about Great Heroes, while he was a student.
“Everything outside their nature, such as restrictions and constrains, must be swept away by the great strength of their nature…When Great Heroes give full play to their impulses, they are magnificently powerful, stormy and invincible. Their power is like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, and like a sex-maniac on heat and prowling for a lover…there is no way to stop them.”
He preferred change to peace.
“Long lasting peace is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbances have to be created in this state of peace….When we look at history, we adore the times of [war] when dramas happened one after another…which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored…Human nature loves sudden swift changes.”
How to change China, he was asked?
“the country must be…destroyed and then re-formed. This applies to the country, the nation, and to mankind…The destruction of the universe is the same…People like me long for its destruction, because when the old universe is destroyed, a new universe will be formed. Isn’t that better!”
Mao Zedong was strongly influenced by one of his teachers, Yang Changji. Yang would later be a Professor of Ethics at Peking University and be part of the same institution as Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, two of the founders of the Communist Party of China. Mao was able to meet both of them in the few years before the first party congress. Mao was also able to get a job as a junior librarian at Peking University through the doors opened for him by Yang. But Mao was looked down on by the intellectuals in the capital. Mao had a strong Hunan accent. Some of them had studied in France, Japan and elsewhere. But Mao never left China until he was in his late 50s. He did not speak French or Japanese or Russian. In Beijing, he felt shunned by the intellectuals. “Most of them did not treat me like a human being.”
In Beijing, Mao spent time with his old teacher Yang. He also spent time with Yang’s daughter Kaihui, who was then 17 years old. At that point, Kaihui was not interested in Mao, but that did change. It was only after her father died in 1920, that she fell in love with Mao.
She later recalled,
“He wrote me many letters, expressing his love. Still I did not dare to believe I had such luck. If it had not been a friend who knew his feelings and told me about them- saying that he was very miserable because of me- I believe I would have remained single all my life. Ever since I came to know his true feelings towards me completely, from that day on, I had a new sense. I felt that apart from living for my mother, I was also living for him…I was imagining that if there were a day when he died, and when my mother was also no longer with me, I would definitely follow him and die with him!”
When they were both in Changsha, they became lovers. He was a schoolmaster. She would visit him, but never stay the night. Until one time, Mao wrote her a poem. Only after that, would she stay. Their lovemaking was loud enough to disturb others. Mao was reminded that teachers were not allowed to have their wives stay there. As schoolmaster, he then changed the rules. She could stay.
They were married at the end of 1920. That was the year before Mao attended the first congress of the Communist Party of China.
In the 1920s, Mao was never a national leader among the Communists. Chen Duxiu, the Peking University professor, was the first leader of the party. He became associated with the decision of Communists to join the Guomindang and to collaborate with the Nationalists. After both sides of the Guomindang party turned on the Communists during the successful Northern Expedition, Chen was stripped of power in the Communist Party. But the urban intellectuals were in charge. People like Li Lisan and Zhou Enlai, who had studied in France. Zhou Enlai and Wang Ming, another leader of the Communist Party in the early 1930s, were also sent to Moscow for training.
These intellectuals had all read the works of Karl Marx. Marx stressed the role of urban workers, the proletariat, as the revolutionary class. And in Russia, the home of the world’s first successful and permanent Communist revolution, it had been the workers and soldiers around the capital of St. Petersburg who had started the revolution. The Communist leaders in China, including their advisors from the Comintern, believed that the workers in cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai, Wuhan and provincial capitals would be important for a successful revolution.
That is why Mao became involved with the Autumn Harvest Uprising, when he was ordered to take the provincial capital of Changsha. That failed, he retreated to the Ridge of Wells hills by the border of Hunan and Jiangxi and left behind his wife Yang Kaihui and his three children with her.
Four months later, and without letting Kaihui know, Mao married another woman. Mao’s third wife was a Communist he met because she was his translator. He could not speak with the locals in the Ridge of Wells area. Mao did not know or ever learn the local speech. Now and later, he had to rely on translators. He Zizhen, who became his third wife, was a true believer. She was head of the Women’s Department for her county and had cut her hair short. That itself was a revolutionary act. She was around 18 years old, beautiful and desired by many men. She did not fall in love with Mao the way Mao’s second wife had. Mao was almost twice Zizhen’s age. But she chose him because of her “need for protection politically in the environment”.
From time to time, Nationalist or local armies did attack Communists. The Communists were now travelling southeast towards Fujian and the Nationalists were following. The government troops got within half a kilometre of the rear of the red force, but then turned around. They would be needed by Nanjing to deal with the warlords. Mao and Zhu were saved by the rebellions mentioned in the War of the Central Plains episode. Chiang Kai-shek needed his armies to put down the warlords.
The Central Plains War and associated rebellions against Nanjing were a godsend to these Communists. The Communists were not on the top of Nanjing or the western press’ mind. From 1928 to 1931, Chinese and foreign newspapers barely mentioned Chinese Communists. The Communists themselves were trying to survive and were mostly in remote areas close to provincial boundaries.
It took the pressure off them as they were clinging to life and as Mao was learning his way in a remote area. This allowed Mao and others to work through mistakes, survive, learn and grow. By the time the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek turned their attention to the Communists again, they were stronger than they had first been.
At this point, the Communists usually had more people than guns. One example was an infantry company of 141 combatants. As weapons, it only had 6 pistols, one light machine gun and 11 rifles. One downside to being in the remote, inland hills was receiving few supplies from the Soviet Union. The Comintern communicated with the Chinese Communists via wireless to Shanghai, which was controlled by those educated, internationalist Communists, who then sent instructions to the various Red Army groups.
Mao benefited from this relative independence. He did mostly what he wanted while sending ingratiating messages to headquarters in Shanghai. “The latest Comintern order…made me jump for joy three hundred times.” “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.”
One of the first things the Communists did in Fujian was capture Tingzhou, a wealthy trading city. Morale improved as the Communists enjoyed the spoils from confiscating from merchants. Now for the first time, the Chinese Red Army got a uniform. Until then, they had worn clothing of all colours and kinds. Now their uniforms were grey like the Nationalist Army, but with a red star on the cap and a red insignia.
Mao had the city’s chief defender killed and his body hanged upside down on a chestnut tree beside where Mao gave a speech. The city hall was demolished and a villa was used as the new red headquarters. A new representative of the party arrived and criticized Mao for having demoted the Red Army Commander-in-Chief Zhu De without authorization. Mao had assumed sole command without permission. Now Mao had to be diplomatic with the Communist Party headquarters in Shanghai. He excused it as having been a special situation and sent Shanghai a message which read “please…set up a special communications office….Here is opium worth 10,000 yuan as start-up funds for the office.”
Now with the party representative’s support, Zhu stood up for himself. Most of the soldiers supported him and Zhu became Commander-in-Chief again. Mao apparently had little support among the ordinary masses in the Red Army then. Having been voted out, Mao said he would leave and “do some work with local civilians”. He left on a litter, meaning that he was carried on the shoulders of others. His third wife and a few followers came too.
Mao left for an area that had recently been conquered by other Communists. He called for a congress there, but then manipulated things by sending the locals off to do investigations. When they returned, Mao claimed he was sick and further delayed things. His secretary later admitted Mao was not actually ill. Then the congress finally started and the proceedings were dragged out over 20 days without reaching any decisions. News then came that government troops were close and the congress closed without electing anyone to key posts. As soon as the locals left, Mao assigned followers from Hunan to the vacant positions. Virtually none of them could speak the local tongue and when the local delegates found out they were very unhappy. They tried to send a message to the Fujian Provincial Committee, but their messenger was arrested and communications did not get through.
Mao then gained the support of one of Zhu De’s subordinates: Lin Biao. Mao invited Lin to lecture in the district Mao had just taken over. Later when the Nationalists attacked, Zhu De drew up a defence plan. Lin then failed to show up as ordered with 6000 troops. Nevertheless, Zhu was a strong military commander and defended well in spite of Lin’s absence. But the Red Army complained to Shanghai. Zhou Enlai was an important leader in Shanghai, but the real authority were Comintern representatives. They controlled the party budget and handled communications with Moscow. Moscow respected Zhou Enlai as an organizer. He never sought the number 1 position and was reliable. At times, he ran the Communist Party of China’s intelligence services, a form of Chinese KGB. Zhou Enlai considered the complaints against Mao, agreed that Mao had broken the rules, but then sided with him. Mao was a rule breaker but deemed correct. Zhou reinstated Mao and instructed “your first and foremost task is to develop your guerilla area…and expand the Red Army”.
Mao had been reinstated as the highest local authority over the Red Army, but he still stayed where he was and did not return to the area where Zhu was. He was enjoying good food. A kilo of beef each day was stewed into soup and a whole chicken. I’m not sure how many people that was for, but Mao was eating well. He was known for his rough language and would describe how fit he was by saying “I can eat a lot and shit a lot”. Zhu wrote to Mao again and again, urging him to return. Mao ignored the requests. Finally, Zhu sent troops to personally escort Mao back. Mao considered that an act of submission and joined him. He kept Zhu on and the army continued to be associated both with Mao and Zhu. Zhu accepted the situation, but occasionally privately complained, as he did in February 1931 when he admitted he was, “just a plaything in Mao’s hands, he had no power. Mao just toyed with him.”
Mao was clever with phrasing. Since he was not a military man, he invented an insult: “purely military viewpoint”. Since he sometimes lost internal elections, he then attacked votes as “ultra-democracy”. That made them easier to abolish. He didn’t like discomfort and was transported on litters on the shoulders of others, ate good food and enjoyed nice accommodations, so he invented the term “absolute egalitarianism” to disparage those like Zhu who wanted to live and eat like ordinary soldiers.
With Zhu and more soldiers incorporated, Mao’s organization improved. Now land redistribution occurred. Before that, it had been confiscations. Now peasants started to receive land to work.
Mao was learning to be meticulous in researching and understanding the local situation before land redistribution. In Xunwu county, in the far south of Jiangxi province, he had about 10 locals prepare a detailed report which he edited. These locals varied in age, occupation and place of residence within the county. As a result, it provided details on who owned how much land, which businesses were most profitable, how the economy had changed since the time of the Guangxu Emperor. It was later published and I’ve read a translation of this almost 200 page document about just one county.
In Mao’s own words, they did these investigations “to determine correct tactics for the struggle, to determine which class is the mainstay of the revolutionary struggle, which class we ought to make an alliance with, which class we must strike down.”
In the rural areas around Xunwu City, poor peasants, meaning those with insufficient grain and who received loans were 70.0% of the population. Middle peasants, those who had enough to eat and who did not receive loans, were 18.3%. Rich peasants who had surplus grain and money to give loans were 4%.
Mao said there were four layers of poor peasants, each worse off than the other. There were those who had:
1) Insufficient land;
2) No land, but oxen, plows and some money;
3) No land, basic plows, a little money and rented an ox at times; and
4) No land, no money, no animal power, borrowed rice and salt.
The very poor were so poor that they frequently had to sell their sons. The buyers were usually gentry or rich peasants sharing the same surname. The most common price was 100-200 yuan. The price was higher, 200-300 yuan, in Guangdong to the south. They didn’t call it selling, but adoption. “They estimate that 10 percent of the households in the county have sold their sons. Liu Liangfan told us that he had seen of, or heard about, more than a hundred boys being sold in the vicinity of his village.” Matchmakers received a fee.
Of the landlords, who rented out land, almost a quarter of them were bankrupt small landlords that Mao said supported the revolution. They were in the process of losing land and were not attached to the existing system.
In Xunwu City itself, with 2684 persons “There are over 30 brothels...These prostitutes, combined with people they support, number 162. Those loafers who are neither workers nor peasants nor merchants specialize in gambling, blackmail, or being running dogs for the rulers…The number of loafers and prostitutes is about equal to the number of merchants and artisans. This shows the stunning number of jobless people.”
Mao considered 60% of the population to be illiterate. Of the 40% who were literate, only half of them could read 200 characters and less than half could keep accounts. Only ¼ of the literate could read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A bit fewer could write a letter. Only 1 in 20 of the literate could write an essay.
The party gave four options for land redistribution. Most communities picked the per capita distribution method and only based on the smallest possible area for the population count. They did not want outsiders involved in receiving land. The land extended beyond that area since currently people may have farmed in another township. That land was included in the redistribution. “The simple question is how to redistribute this massive amount of land. Apparently, dividing the total quantity of land by the total number of persons was the most direct and equitable land redistribution. It also was supported by the majority of the masses. The minority who did not approve of this method (landlords and rich peasants) was frightened by the power of the masses and did not dare say a word.”
“Red Army soldiers and revolutionaries not only got land, the soviet also mobilized peasants to farm the land for them.”
With Mao and Zhu working together and with Mao on top, their small force began to grow. Mao originally named it the First Division of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Army. It was then renamed the Fourth Red Army. They also had red guard guerilla units who did not wear uniforms. They were auxiliaries who assisted the Red Army by delaying government troops, providing information and supplies. They also helped with collaboration with the local people. This was a key factor in the growth of the Red Army. Land reform and cooperation with the population were vital.
Over time, Mao implemented Three Rules and Eight Points that the Communist soldiers were to follow. The three rules were:
1) Obey orders in all your actions;
2) Do not take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses;
3) Turn in everything captured.
There is evidence that Mao himself broke these rules. He was disobedient to the Party leadership in Shanghai, which was going through a series of leaders and mostly tried to follow Moscow’s recommendations. Mao was more independent minded and sought out opportunities and avoided risky battles regardless of instructions from party leaders. One of Mao’s unscripted adventures was his raid on the prosperous Fujian city of Zhangzhou around April 1932. He had valuables carted back and hidden for about two years. He only revealed them and turned them over to the party two years later just before the Long March. That is a bit ahead of the rest of the story, but I wanted to highlight that Mao excused himself from following his three rules. His behaviour reminds me of George Orwell’s line from Animal Farm. “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Orwell understood communism very well.
The following eight points also weren’t always followed, maybe they were more like recommendations, but here they are:
1. Speak politely;
2. Pay fairly for what you buy;
3. Return everything you borrow;
4. Pay for anything you damage;
5. Do not hit or swear at people;
6. Do not damage crops;
7. Do not take liberties with women;
8. Do not ill treat captives.
The Communists ran Lenin schools, but the only provided primary education. Secondary education suffered.
The local people were mobilized. In theory, all citizens between 24 and 40, except former landowners, were part of the Red Guards, with those between 18 and 23 years old joining the Young Vanguard. But generally, only strong, able-bodied males were used in military operations. The rest of the population assisted with food, supplies, transport, medical services, communications and intelligence gathering. To get people to voluntarily associate with the Communists, political training and education was key. “The Red Army fights not merely for the sake of fighting but in order to conduct propaganda work among the masses, organize them, arm them, and help them to establish revolutionary political power.” The Communists were getting better at that.
In newly “liberated” areas, the Political Department of the Army set up the administrative structure. This was consistent until the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. They would then bring about peasant ownership of land. This explains Mao’s use of the phrase “Revolutionary Agrarian War”.
Mao praised himself and said, “The tactics we have derived from the struggle of the past three years are indeed different from any other tactics, ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign.” But in fact, retreating to the hills was a classic technique of Chinese rebels. So too was guerilla warfare, taking the enemy by surprise and avoiding the wasting of men. Those strategies are discussed in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Land redistribution was somewhat new, but of course the Soviet Union had already experimented with various forms by then and even the Taiping rebels had used a common treasury. But Mao did help simplify and spread ideas that Sun Tzu would recognize: “The enemy advances, we retreat.” “The enemy camps, we harass.” “The enemy tires, we attack.” “The enemy retreats, we pursue.” Military strategy in 4 Chinese characters.
Mao argued for building bases and developing the Red Army. This was in contrast to orders by the party leadership in Shanghai to pursue putsches in cities like Canton (Guangzhou) and to take control and then hope to build political support after.
Li Lisan came to be associated with that strategy. Li Lisan, like Mao, was from Hunan province. But unlike Mao, he had left China. He studied in France and became a Communist there. He then was active in the trade unions of Guangzhou and Shanghai. The Comintern and Li Lisan advocated for mass action in cities as soon as possible. In particular, they wanted to take the major cities of the central provinces of China, such as Changsha and Wuhan.
One resolution of the Communist Party of China from that time reads:
“The great struggle of the proletariat is the decisive force as far as preliminary successes in one or several provinces are concerned. Without a wave of strikes staged by the working class, without armed insurrection in the key cities, there can be no success in one or several provinces. It is a wholly mistaken idea not to pay particular attention to urban work and to count on the villages to surround the towns.” They wanted the Red Army to attack the enemy’s main forces, the large cities and the communication channels. Guerilla warfare was incompatible with such a plan.
The Shanghai Communist officials looked at the War of the Central Plains and believed they had an opportunity. The Nationalists were fighting the warlords. They were distracted. Now was a chance to take Changsha, Wuhan and Nanchang, they believed. Peng Dehuai was indeed able to take Changsha in July 1930. It was barely defended. He was able to hold it for about 10 days. But the people were hostile and the provincial governor was then able to retake it easily. Peng’s troops had killed a US seaman on the USS Guam on a local river after being shelled by Peng’s soldiers. Now gunboats from four countries assisted the provincial troops in retaking control from the Communists. Peng then retreated, along with 3000 new recruits who were sympathetic. But then in the retaliations, what underground organization remained in Changsha was wiped out. This was as close to success as the Communists experienced with the planned attacks. They never took Wuhan or Nanchang then.
Mao and Zhu disobeyed orders to attack Nanchang and instead delayed and then promised to rendezvous with the retreating Peng. Mao then messaged Peng to say he was coming to help him. Peng said he did not need help. So, then Mao asked Peng to help him take a town. Peng moved east and when he arrived, Mao maneuvered to become Peng’s superior and to absorb those veteran troops under Mao’s command.
Then the Communists attacked Changsha again. That was a foolish plan. This time, the Nationalists were waiting for them and there was no element of surprise. The Communists didn’t have any artillery. That made attacking a defended city extremely difficult. Nevertheless, Peng followed the orders he disagreed with, while, according to the Soviet Military Intelligence GRU chief’s report to Moscow “Mao just looked on.” Mao did use this second siege of Changsha to issue a Press Release. He proclaimed an All-China Revolutionary Committee with himself as Chairman. After a while, Mao called off the siege and ordered Peng’s troops to follow him. They mutinied and Mao began a purge. In the same month, Shanghai announced that the post of Chaiman belonged to the Party’s general secretary. But Mao was not punished. Moscow seemed to condone hungry leaders.
The attack on Wuhan was a greater failure. The troops never reached the city. Looking back, it was a poor strategy to try to take those cities given how small and poorly armed the Communist forces were.
At first, the Communist Party leaders defended themselves and only admitted that they had overestimated the evolution of the revolutionary situation and the speed. “The Central Committee has made tactical mistakes here and there.” But soon after, Li Lisan was blamed for the failures, which became known as a Leftist Deviation in the traditional Communist Party histories.
Moscow may have put the blame on Li because he had asked for the Soviets to send its soldiers into China to help the reds and to return Mongolia to Red China. The USSR had no intention of returning Mongolia to China, now or later.
Somehow, Moscow spared its Comintern criticism for advocating the takeover of Chinese cities. Li Lisan went to Moscow and engaged in self criticisms. He married a Russian and appeared in China a couple of times, both in Yenan after the Long March and in Manchuria with the Soviet Red Army after the defeat of the Japanese. He was later Minister of Labour in the People’s Republic and was sure to self-criticize and to praise Mao. I understand Li was a victim in China’s Cultural Revolution and committed suicide in 1967.
The siege of Changsha led to a personal tragedy for Mao’s ex-wife (his second wife). Yang Kaihui had fallen deeply in love with Mao. They had three sons together. But Mao had abandoned her at the time of the Autumn Harvest Uprising.
The Provincial Governor knew who she was and had let her live in peace. Even after the first attack by Peng and when the government troops recaptured the city, she was left alone. But with the second siege and Mao’s Press Release that he was Chairman of all China, she and their oldest son were arrested. She was offered freedom if she would denounce Mao. She didn’t and was executed. The executioners then, in accordance with Chinese custom, took off her shoes and carried them as far away as they could so that her spirit could not follow them home. The son was released and later it was Mao’s younger brother and not Mao himself who made arrangements for the children to travel to Shanghai where they were entered into a secret Communist kindergarten.
In 1982, during renovations to her old home, poems Kaihui had written were uncovered. Here is one she wrote in October 1928, one year after Mao had left. He had only written once and in it mentioned he had trouble with his feet. She did not yet know that he had remarried.
“Downcast day a north wind starts,
Thick chill seeps through flesh and bones.
Thinking of this Far-away Man,
Suddenly waves churn out of calm.
Is the foot trouble healed?
Is the winter clothing ready?
Who cares for you while you sleep alone?
Are you as lonely and sad as I am?
No letters are coming through,
I ask, but no one answers.
How I wish I had wings,
Fly to see this man.
Unable to see him,
Sorrow, it has no end…
With Mao absent from Jiangxi and close to Peng and Changsha, A Communist named Li took control of the Jiangxi Red Centre. When Mao returned, he staged a takeover. Mao called a joint conference. It was to take place on the 10th of the month, but then at the least minute he changed it to the 6th. By the time the delegates arrived, Mao and his small group, including his third wife’s brother, had already named the leadership positions. Li was demoted. There was resistance to this takeover and Mao responded with the public execution of four well-known local Communists for being “counterrevolutionaries”. Mao’s brother-in-law was quick to threaten executions. And Mao claimed that in Jiangxi “Party organisations on all levels are filled with landlords and kulaks” (meaning rich peasants of the kind that Stalin was killing). Mao himself came from such a family, which could have been called kulak. His father was a reasonably affluent farmer. But Mao outmaneuvered his local opponents. In his subsequent crackdown, several thousand communists were killed under Mao’s orders.
Mao was not the only one engaged in purges. There was another major purge at the Oyuman Soviet, north of the Yangzi River. Mao’s future competitor, Zhang Guotao, was involved there. More than 2000 people, including at least 700 party members were killed in that internal strife.
The Communist Party in Shanghai sent someone to be Red Army Commander in Mao’s territory. Mao did not let him take up duties. Instead, Mao’s brother-in-law led the troops. There was no telephone, radio or telegraph links with Shanghai and Mao kept information tightly controlled. Only messengers relayed communication. Couriers were detained and one party inspector may have been murdered, according to Jung Chang’s book. Communication stopped so abruptly, that it was understood that Mao had died. His obituary appeared in the Comintern magazine in Moscow at that time. When it was revealed the next month that Mao was alive and had taken over the territory in Jiangxi, the Communist Party responded by issuing a circular to all Red Armies telling them they must obey no one by Shanghai.
Reading that, the local Red Army revolted as did the peasants. Mao’s brother-in-law then called the rebels Anti-Bolsheviks and within a month, thousands were killed by Mao’s side.
Following Li Lisan’s time in charge, the Internationalists, under the direction of Wang Ming and the so-called 28 Bolsheviks from the Soviet Union, controlled the central party apparatus.
While Mao was never persecuted and he had some protection at the highest levels because of the reputation he had already earned and the positive publicity that the Soviets had previously given him, he was increasingly on the outs with the central party in Shanghai. They called him to Shanghai and Mao found ways to avoid doing so. Others were not as lucky.
This was also another period when Communists in the cities controlled by the KMT or provincial governments were eliminated. In 1930, an ally of Mao, reorganized the Jiangsu Provincial Committee in a way that the 28 Bolsheviks rejected. The next day, he and a few others, were arrested in Shanghai by British police. They were then turned over to the Nanjing authorities and shot. It is possible that the party might have given up their location as a way of removing this independent minded Communist organizer.
Separately, in Hankou, one of the cities that make up Wuhan, Gu Shunzhang was arrested by the local police. He had been a wanted man for at least 3 years. He was the head of the Communist Secret Service. He had been trained in the USSR and selected by Zhou Enlai. Known as the magician, he was in costume as a juggler when he was arrested. Once he was captured, he turned on the reds and provided valuable intelligence to the Nationalists. One notable arrest from the sweeps during this time was Ho Chi Minh, the famous Vietnamese Communist, in Hong Kong. He was deported and travelled to Moscow. The French intelligence service later estimated that several thousand Communists were executed over the next three months as a result of Gu’s information. One of the people sold out by Gu was the General Secretary of the party. He was one of the few actual members of the proletariat among the Communist leadership. He was probably more of a figurehead than the real power in the party. But he was arrested at the jewelry store in the French concession of Shanghai that he ran as a front. The French were upset that Communists had recently been aiming propaganda at French troops in Shanghai. Before that, the French zone had often been a haven for Communists. Before he was shot, he revealed much of what he knew to his captors. Wang Ming then replaced him as Secretary -General and Wang is associated with the Internationalists clique of the Communist Party of China.
Until 1930, soviets only existed at the district level. In February 1930, the first provincial soviet was created in Jiangxi. A Soviet Congress was to be convened and originally a meeting was to occur at the end of May 1930 in Shanghai. It was then postponed twice and the location moved to Jiangxi. It finally occurred a year and half after originally scheduled and not in Shanghai. The purges, arrests and executions may have been factors in the delays. So too might have been the changes in leadership from Li Lisan to Wang Ming and the 28 Bolsheviks. When the election did take place, Mao was elected President of the Chinese Soviet Republic.
This was the first time that Mao had a leadership position of national significance. He had survived the executions in the cities. He had avoided the internal purges among the urban intellectuals. He had led and thrived through purges in the south. He was now President of the Chinese Soviet Republic and had done it his way. By focusing on his on the ground observations and lessons, he had avoided the mistakes of the Marxist purists who took lessons from Europe too literally. He had also used his long held wishes to overturn order and to turn the world upside down. But he was still more of a figurehead. There were still tensions between those internationalist and intellectual Communists in control in Shanghai, and Mao as new President of the Chinese Soviet Republic centred in Jiangxi. The Internationalists still held the real power during this period before the Long March. Mao’s position was structured in such a way that he did not control the Red Army.
Mao and his followers still were at risk. The KMT’s third encirclement campaign was making progress. This was the first time Chiang Kai-shek had taken direct command.
But then, Japan made major moves in Manchuria. This halted the KMT advance as it now had to focus on a foreign aggressor. Chiang Kai-shek paused his offensive against the Communists and focused on Japan and Manchuria. Once again, the Communists benefited from fighting elsewhere. They used the Manchurian invasion to step up attacks against the KMT, which had withdrawn troops from the centre of China. The Soviet areas in China grew, especially northwest of Wuhan. The Soviet Union was fearful of Japanese army moves from Manchuria into the USSR itself. The Communist Party initially parroted the Soviet Union’s viewpoint. “The Chinese Communist Party considers the Japanese attack in Manchuria as an imperialist attack and the prelude to the next large-scale imperialist attack on the U.S.S.R.” Please join us next time as Japan captures Manchuria and sets up a puppet regime there. It even involves Pu Yi, who will become Emperor for the third time.
For my sources:
https://chineserevolution.substack.com/p/literary-sources
https://buymeacoffee.com/thechineserevolution