Mao: The Unknown Story

But the man went on: “What! It was our regimental commander who ordered us to do this. And he said it was the order of Comrade Gao Gang [local Communist leader], who of course was carrying out the order of Chairman Mao. We only recognise Chairman Mao’s authority. Whatever Chairman Mao asks us to do, we do.”

Kuo-tao himself was subjected to multiple “torments … masterminded by Mao,” he later wrote. He was thrown out of his house by Mao’s secretary so that Mao could take it over, and his orderly was arrested. Mao even tormented Kuo-tao’s young son, who was cast as the leading Trotskyist Chang Mu-tao in a school play. Kuo-tao described arriving at the school to find “a group of people were ridiculing my son. Mao Tse-tung was also there, having fun. He cackled maliciously: ‘It fits perfectly to have Chang Kuo-tao’s son play the role of Chang Mu-tao.’ … I tore away the mask my son was wearing and led him away from the scene. I shouted in anger as I left: ‘Barbarians!.. Worse than beasts!’ ”

BY SPRING 1938, Kuo-tao was at the end of his tether. This was right at the moment when Mao’s own position was unusually weak, as he was out of line with Moscow’s orders to fight Japan. Kuo-tao spotted a chance to join hands with Wang Ming, who represented Moscow’s viewpoint. At the time, Wang Ming was in Wuhan, Chiang’s temporary capital, with Chou En-lai and Po Ku. On 4 April, in his capacity as chairman of the Red region, Kuo-tao left Yenan for a joint Nationalist — CCP ceremony at the tomb of the mythical Yellow Emperor, outside the base area. After the ceremony he drove off to Xian, and from there he went on to Wuhan to see Wang Ming and his colleagues.

This was the rarest of rare opportunities, with the majority of the core Party leadership, all in disagreement with Mao, out of Yenan at the same time, and thus out of Mao’s clutches. (Xiang Ying, Mao’s fiercest critic and the head of the N4A, was near Wuhan.) The content of Kuo-tao’s confabulations in Wuhan is one of the CCP’s most closely guarded secrets. Almost certainly, Kuo-tao argued for ousting Mao. Yenan later told Moscow that Kuo-tao had “tried to break the unity of the Party” when he was in Wuhan. But he left empty-handed, probably because the Wuhan trio did not believe that Moscow would stand for dumping Mao. Whereas Kuo-tao was desperate, Wang Ming was at the peak of his confidence, and it may have been hard for him to appreciate that Mao’s apparent acceptance of majority decisions masked a ferocious determination to claw his way back into control.

The talks went on for about a week. When Kuo-tao realized that he was getting nowhere, he decided to leave the Party for the Nationalists, which he did on 17 April. The Wuhan trio let him go. He then wrote to his wife, whom he had left behind in Yenan, pregnant, asking her to join him, with their twelve-year-old son. Mao stalled for two months, to make sure that Kuo-tao did no drastic damage, and then allowed them to leave.

These words of Mao’s reveal why he maneuvered so relentlessly to avoid entering Sichuan after the Zunyi Conference. They also show that he was prepared to kill huge numbers of fellow-Communist troops for his own ends. When Kuo-tao’s wife came to Wuhan, Chou advised her to tell her husband “not to burn his bridges with the Party.” Kuo-tao took notice. He had once been the head of the CCP’s Military Department, in charge of planting high-level agents in the Nationalist military, but he never revealed a single name to the Nationalists. In fact, he did little for them, and they were disappointed with him. His thousand-page-plus autobiography conspicuously failed to spill many beans. A sign that he kept his mouth shut was that after he fled the Mainland on the eve of Mao’s conquest of China, one of his sons was allowed back to go to university in Canton in the mid-1950s. He outlived Mao and died in an old people’s home in Toronto, Canada, in 1979, aged eighty-two, having converted to Christianity the year before.

Kuo-tao’s defection to the Nationalists allowed Mao to discredit him in the eyes of his army; he was promptly expelled from the Party. Some of his old followers in Yenan were “extremely dissatisfied,” Nationalist intelligence chief Tai Li reported to Chiang Kai-shek. They met in secret, whereupon Mao’s forces “liquidated them all there and then. About 200 were buried alive.”

Moscow waited two months before endorsing the expulsion. During this time, something most crucial for Mao happened: Stalin brought the Comintern purge to an end. Piatnitsky and Melnikov, who had implicated Mao as a Japanese spy, were executed (on the same day), along with a host of others connected to China. Mao’s dossier remained on file, ready to be resuscitated when Stalin needed it again a decade later. But for now Mao was off the hook.

As soon as Mao learned that the Kremlin had approved the expulsion of Kuo-tao, and that he himself was in the clear, he turned to tackle Wang Ming.