Mao: The Unknown Story

MAO’S STANDING WITH the Party began to change in April 1928, when a large Red unit of thousands of men, the surviving Nanchang mutineers, the troops he had angled for right from the start, sought refuge in his base. They came to Mao as a defeated force whose much-depleted ranks had been routed on the south coast the previous October, when the Russians failed to deliver the promised arms. The remnants of the force had been rallied by a 41-year-old officer called Zhu De, a former professional soldier with the rank of brigadier, and something of a veteran among the mainly twentyish Reds. He had gone to Germany in his mid-thirties, and joined the Party before moving on to Russia for special military training. He was a cheerful man, and a soldier’s soldier, who mingled easily with the rank and file, eating and marching with them, carrying guns and backpacks like the rest, wearing straw sandals, a bamboo hat on his back. He was constantly to be found at the front.

Mao had always coveted the Nanchang mutineers, and when he first arrived in outlaw territory had sent a message urging Zhu to join him, but Zhu had declined. Shanghai’s orders had been to launch uprisings in the southeast corner of Hunan around New Year 1928, and Zhu, as a loyal Party man, had followed orders. The uprisings failed abysmally, thanks to the sheer absurdity and brutality of Moscow’s tactics. According to a report at the time, the policy was to “kill every single one of the class enemies and burn and destroy their homes.” The slogan was “Burn, burn, burn! Kill, kill, kill!” Anyone unwilling to kill and burn was termed “running dog of the gentry [who] deserves to be killed.”

In line with this policy, Zhu’s men razed two whole towns, Chenzhou and Leiyang, to the ground. The result was to foment a real uprising — against the Communists. One day, at a rally held to try to force peasants to do more burning and killing, the peasants revolted and killed the attending Communists. In village after village and town after town where Zhu’s men were active, rebellions sprang up against the Reds. Peasants slaughtered grassroots Party members, tore off the red neckerchiefs they had been ordered to wear, and donned white ones to demonstrate their allegiance to the Nationalists.

Once Nationalist troops began to apply pressure, Zhu had to run, and thousands of civilians went with him: the families of the activists who had done the burning and killing, who had nowhere else to go. This was what Moscow had intended: peasants must be coerced into doing things that left no way back into normal life. To “get them to join the revolution,” the Party had decreed, “there is only one way: use Red terror to prod them into doing things that leave them with no chance to make compromises later with the gentry and bourgeoisie.” One man from Leiyang recounted: “I had suppressed [i.e., killed] counter-revolutionaries, so I could not live peacefully now. I had to go all the way … So I burned my own house with my own hands … and left [with Zhu].”

After these people left, the cycle of revenge and retribution brought more casualties, among them a young woman who had been adopted by Mao’s mother, called Chrysanthemum Sister. She had followed Mao into the Party and married a Communist, and they had a young child. Although it seems she and her husband did not support the killings by the Reds, nevertheless her husband was executed after Zhu’s army left Leiyang, and his head exhibited in a wooden cage on the city wall. Chrysanthemum Sister was imprisoned. She wanted to recant, but her captors refused permission. She wrote to a relative that she was made to “suffer all the pains I had never imagined existed” and yearned for death: “I long to die and not go on being tortured … It would be such relief to leave this world. But my poor [baby], it’s so painful to think of him. I had so many plans about bringing him up. Never did I dream all this was going to happen … My baby must not blame me …” Chrysanthemum Sister was later executed.

Zhu came to Mao as a defeated man, while Mao could represent himself as the person who had in effect saved what was the largest detachment of Communist troops still functioning, at a time when other Red bases were crumbling. All the uprisings the Russians had ordered in the past months had ended in failure. The most famous Red base, Hailufeng, on the south coast, collapsed in late February 1928. During its two-month existence, the area, called “Little Moscow”—there was even a “Red Square,” with a gateway copied from the Kremlin — became a carnage ground under its leader Peng Pai, a man with a thirst for blood. Over 10,000 people were butchered; “reactionary villages were razed wholesale to the ground.”