Mao: The Unknown Story

He turned a deaf ear to Mao’s suggestion to send Chou. But Mao dispatched Chou anyway, telling the Young Marshal on the 15th that Chou was coming, and asking for a plane to pick him up in Yenan. When Chou reached Yenan, there was no plane, and the city gate was closed to him; he had to wait all night outside the walls, in sub-zero temperatures. “The guards refused to open the gate and refused to listen to reason,” Mao wired the Young Marshal, exhorting him to do something. The Young Marshal was literally freezing Chou out, an indication of how bitter he felt about the Reds misleading him over Moscow’s attitude.

On the 17th he relented. He was looking for a way to end the fiasco, so he sent his Boeing to fetch Chou. His American pilot, Royal Leonard, was shocked to find he was carrying Reds (who had only recently been peppering his plane). En route back that snowy afternoon, he played a trick on his passengers. “I deliberately picked rough air,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Occasionally, I peeked back into the cabin and enjoyed watching the Communists … holding their black beards aside with one hand and vomiting into a can held in the other.”

The Young Marshal accepted Chou through gritted teeth, though he presented an amicable façade and played along with his guest. When Chou urged him to kill the Generalissimo, he pretended he would do so “when civil war is unavoidable and Xian is besieged” by government forces.

Mao had in fact been trying to provoke a war between Nanjing and Xian. He hoped to trigger this off by moving Red troops towards Nanjing. On the 15th he secretly ordered his top commanders to “strike at the enemy’s head: the Nanjing government …” But he had to scrap the plan, as it would have been suicidal for the Red Army, and there was no guarantee it would set off a Nanjing — Xian war. To his delight, on the 16th Nanjing declared war on the Young Marshal, moving armies towards Xian and bombing the Young Marshal’s troops outside the city. Mao urged the Young Marshal not just to fight back, but to broaden the fighting into a major war by striking out towards Nanjing. The following day, Mao cabled him, saying: “The enemy’s jugulars are Nanjing and [two key railway lines]. If 20 to 30 thousand … troops can be dispatched to strike these railway lines … the overall situation will change at once. Please do consider this.” Mao’s hope was that by taking such action, the Young Marshal would burn his bridges with Nanjing and thus be more likely to kill Chiang.

WHILE MAO WAS maneuvering to have Chiang killed, Stalin put his foot down to save the Generalissimo. On 13 December, the day after Chiang was seized, the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Nanjing was summoned by acting prime minister H. H. Kung (Chiang’s brother-in-law) to be told that “word was around” that the CCP was involved in the coup, and that “if Mr. Chiang’s safety was endangered, the anger of the nation would extend from the CCP to the Soviet Union and could put pressure on [the Chinese government] to join with Japan against the Soviet Union.” Stalin understood that the kidnapping might pose an urgent threat to his strategic interests.

At midnight on the 14th, the phone rang in the office of Comintern chief Dimitrov. Stalin was on the line. “Was it with your permission that the events in China took place?” he asked. Dimitrov hastily answered: “No! That would be the greatest service anyone could possibly render Japan. Our position on these events is the same.” Using ominous language, Stalin went on to question the role of the CCP’s delegate at the Comintern, who had submitted to Stalin the draft of a cable to be sent to the CCP in favor of executing Chiang: “Who is this Wang Ming of yours? Is he a provocateur? I hear he wanted to send a telegram to have Chiang killed.” At the time, Dimitrov’s Chinese assistant recalled, “you could not find anyone” at Comintern HQ who did not think that “Chiang must be finished off.” Even Stalin’s top man at the Comintern, the normally cool Manuilsky, “rubbed his hands, embraced me, and exclaimed: ‘Our dear friend has been caught, aha!’ ”

Wang Ming pleaded that the draft cable had been suggested by the deputy head of the GRU, Artur Artuzov. Artuzov was soon arrested and accused of being a spy. Before he was shot, he protested his innocence in a letter written in his own blood, which, his jailer noted icily, had come “from his nose.” Stalin spared Wang Ming. And Dimitrov scrambled to clear himself and lay the blame on Mao. He wrote to Stalin: “in spite of our warnings, the … Chinese Party in fact entered into very close, friendly relations with [the Young Marshal].” More damningly, Dimitrov told Stalin: “it is hard to imagine [the Young Marshal] would have undertaken his adventurist action without coordination with them [Mao and his colleagues] or even without their participation.” This was clearly suggesting that Mao was lying about having no prior knowledge of the event, and that Mao had flouted Moscow’s orders.