Mao Zedong (11 page)

The Jinggangshan period of Mao’s life ended in January 1929, when he decided to find a new base area with greater resources and less constant pressure from militarist or Guomindang counterattacks. Mao’s final decision was to move to a new base area in the border zone between eastern Jiangxi and western Fujian provinces. Down from the mountains, Mao found himself once again subject to pressures from the Party leadership and assaulted for the survival policies he had followed. One particularly sharp injunction told Mao to “leave the army” and report to Shanghai for instructions. Mao prevaricated, and in an unambiguous response to the Party center told them it would be a serious mistake “to fear the development of the power of the peasants lest it outstrip the workers’ leadership and become detrimental to the revolution.” A series of crucial Party meetings were held in western Fujian (Mao had still not gone to Shanghai, as instructed), and Mao’s positions on the rural revolution and the role of military force came under fierce criticism.

Mao was ill at this time, once again; this does not seem to have been a “diplomatic” illness, as on occasions in his past, but a debilitating combination of poor food, exhaustion, and malaria. It was also at this time, in Fujian, that their first child, a baby girl, was born to Mao and He Zizhen. Mao’s illness continued through November, and it was in that month that he wrote a brief letter to his schoolmate and friend Li Lisan, now a powerful member of the Politburo and soon to be head of the Party. “I have been ill for three months,” wrote Mao, “and although I am better now, my spirits are not yet fully recovered.” One explanation for this flatness, Mao went on, was that despite the company of He Zizhen he missed his first wife and children: “I often think of Kaihui, Anying, and the others, and would like to communicate with them, but I don’t know their mailing address.” Mao asked Li Lisan to seek out Mao Zemin, his younger brother, in Shanghai, and to get Yang Kaihui’s address, so that Mao could write to her.

There is no surviving letter from Mao to Yang Kaihui, so we do not know if he ever wrote. What we do know is that shifts in Communist policy, under what came to be called the “Li Lisan Line” of renewed assaults on cities, led in October 1930 to a Communist assault on Changsha, where Yang Kaihui was living privately with the three small children and their nanny. The Communist attack was a failure, and in the mopping-up operations conducted by the Guomindang militarists that followed, one of the Guomindang generals heard of Yang Kaihui’s presence in the city and of her relationship with Mao. He arrested and interrogated her, and when she refused to renounce Mao, had her shot. The three children and their nanny were bailed out by friends and sent back to Shanghai, where the children were enrolled in a kindergarten. After the school closed down, they lived hand-to-mouth for years. The youngest one died, but in 1936 the Communist Party located Anying and Anqing, by then in their early teens, and they were sent to the Soviet Union for safety. Mao was reunited with them only in 1946.

The new base area that the Communists finally established, on the Fujian border with Jiangxi, was known as the Jiangxi Soviet, and it was here that Mao spent most of the next five years. The Jiangxi base area, though far larger than Jinggangshan, was also more vulnerable to attack. For virtually the entire period between 1930 and 1934 it was subjected to repeated assaults by Chiang Kai-shek, who was determined to obliterate this main symbol of Communist survival. As had been the case during the period between 1924 and 1927, Mao was again part of a larger political world, with its own rhythms and imperatives, one that sometimes followed the logic of local circumstances and at other times responded to the dictates of the Comintern. Mao was in partial political eclipse much of this time, though another of his meticulous local examinations—his third after Hunan and Jinggangshan—was devoted to exploring the precise nature of rural life in the Jiangxi county of Xunwu, and constitutes one of the major documents of Communist social analysis for this period. In this report Mao assembled information not only on land relations and class structures in Xunwu, but also telegraph and postal services, the flow of business products (both local and foreign), butchers and wine sellers, herbal medicines and tobacco use, lodging houses and barbershops, the wearing of jewelry, the numbers of prostitutes and their clients, literacy rates, and the handling of adultery.

Mao’s career and Party standing fluctuated violently during these years. Much of the time, as titular “chairman” of the provisional Soviet area government, he was the signatory of major Party documents and the convener of meetings, which now had to deal not only with land, labor, and the problem of the militarists, but also with the emerging menace of Japan, which had attacked Shanghai in early 1932 and had taken over the whole of Manchuria. Anti-Japanese nationalism was a potent factor in the Communist Party’s recruitment drives, particularly among the patriotic students. But especially after the senior Communist leadership were forced to abandon Shanghai because of the unrelenting Guomindang police pressure there, and moved to the Jiangxi Soviet, Mao found himself on the sidelines, or else had his recommendations completely overruled. On one occasion he was removed from a committee chairmanship in the middle of a meeting.

On several occasions during this period, Mao took “sick leave,” as he had in the past. Undoubtedly, some of these absences were political ones, and others were more in the nature of compassionate leave—as when He Zizhen had their second child in 1932, which was delivered in a Fujian hospital by a Communist doctor who had once worked with Mao in Jinggangshan. This child, a boy, they named Anhong. Mao and He Zizhen had left their first child, a daughter, with a rural couple in Fujian, so that she would be safe from the fighting, but she died as an infant. Their third child, born in 1933, seems also to have died in infancy. Mao had health problems, too. The malaria that had troubled him before returned for a while, and in late 1932 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, and spent several months in a Fujian sanatorium in the Soviet area before the disease was checked. On various occasions, too, he retreated to isolated scenic sites in the hills with He Zizhen; “bodyguards” were assigned to accompany them, though whether the guards were meant to protect them in case of enemy attack, or constituted a thinly veiled type of house arrest ordered by Mao’s rivals within the Communist Party, is not clear. From April to October 1934, though Mao was technically still chairman of the border region government, he and He Zizhen lived together with their baby son in a hillside temple in what was described as “almost complete isolation.”

During this period, the attacks from Chiang Kai-shek’s forces became so relentless that the Communist Party leadership decided, secretly, that they would have to abandon their base. Mao was not involved in the planning of this all-important event in Chinese Communist history, the first step in what was later to be called “the Long March.” He and his wife joined the great column of some 86,000 fleeing Communist troops and supporters only as it passed near their residence on October 18. About 15,000 Communist troops had been ordered to stay behind in the Soviet, to protect the approximately 10,000 sick or wounded soldiers who could not make the march and to guard the civilian population as well as they could. Mao insisted to Party leaders that He Zizhen—who was once again pregnant—be allowed to make the march with him. There was only a handful of other women on the march, mainly the wives or companions of senior Party leaders, but the couple were not allowed to take their two-year-old son, Anhong, with them. So they entrusted him to Mao’s younger brother Mao Zetan, who was among those staying with the rearguard group. When Zetan in turn had to go away on combat duty, he left the two-year-old with one of his bodyguards. Mao Zetan was subsequently killed in the fighting—in 1935—and the boy was never heard of again.

The Long March, later presented as a great achievement in Communist history, was a nightmare of death and pain while it was in progress. The huge column was bogged down with equipment, party files, weaponry, communications equipment, and whatever else had been salvaged from Jiangxi to help them in setting up a new base area. A devastating attack by the Guomindang artillery and air force as the slow-moving column was trying to cross the Xiang River in northern Guangxi province, took close to half their number in casualties. But the march continued, even though there was no agreement on exactly where they were heading, or even on which direction they should take. The leaders, however, had reached a tacit understanding that when they reached Zunyi, a prosperous city in Guizhou province, they would pause and take stock.

The “Enlarged Meeting of the Politburo” as it was termed, assembled in Zunyi on January 15, 1935, in a crisis atmosphere. Party policy had clearly been disastrous, and the very survival of the revolutionary movement hung in the balance. It was a time both to apportion blame for what had gone wrong and—more important—decide what to do in the immediate future, and who was to lead the Party in doing it. Present at the meetings were seventeen veteran leaders of the Party, including Mao, one Comintern representative, Otto Braun, one interpreter (for Braun), and a notetaker—the thirty-year-old Deng Xiaoping. In terms of assigning blame, the meeting faulted Braun and two of the Chinese Communist leaders for adopting an overly static defense in the Jiangxi Soviet, one relying often on positional warfare and the construction of blockhouses, rather than on swift deployment and mobile warfare, in which superior Communist strength could have been focused on points of Guomindang weakness. Lack of imagination by the same leaders, the majority concluded, made them miss their chance of linking up with a rebellion of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops that broke out in Fujian during 1933. As to immediate goals, the Party should drop the idea of having a base in Guizhou, and instead should cross the Yangtze River and set up a new base in Sichuan province. In terms of Party leadership, there had indeed been “erroneous leadership,” but there was “not a split in the Party.” The “Group of Three” who had been coordinating the Long March up to this point was abolished, and Mao was named to the Standing Committee of the Politburo and given the additional title of “military assistant.” Otto Braun, the Chinese minutes noted, “totally and firmly rejected the criticism of himself.”

The Zunyi meetings gave a major boost to Mao’s prestige, and it is to this time period that one can date his move toward a commanding position within the Party leadership. But many major problems still had not been resolved. It turned out to be impossible to create the Sichuan base, since Guomindang troops and local militarists kept the Communists from crossing the Yangtze, and after circling aimlessly around Guizhou province for several months, often under fierce enemy attack, they had to swing far down into the south before turning north again along the Tibetan border and heading for their final destination, the sparsely populated northwestern province of Shaanxi. Also, there were still many other major Communist military leaders who were opposed to Mao and saw no reason to risk their own troops for his protection. Some of these commanders not only abandoned Mao and established new base areas of their own, but even lured away some of Mao’s finest commanders, so that Mao’s forces steadily shrank despite his formal rise in Party status. Finally, in personal terms, there were tragedies. He Zizhen was almost killed in a bombing raid and was left badly injured, with shrapnel embedded in her body in more than a dozen places. Though she subsequently gave birth, to a girl, because of the dangers and pressures of the campaign the baby had to be left with a local peasant family. The girl was thereafter never found, and was the fourth of the children He Zizhen had with Mao Zedong that was lost to them.

During the fall of 1935, Mao’s greatly diminished forces endured a hellish march through the swamplands and mountains of Qinghai and Gansu, where their main enemies, apart from grim skirmishes with the local tribespeople, were intense hunger—there was almost no food to be either bought or foraged—the constant damp, and freezing temperatures at night. Many of the remaining 15,000 or so people in the column died of malnutrition, suppurating sores, or by eating poisonous weeds and berries. Only between 7,000 and 8,000 of the column survived, reaching the village of Wayabao in Shaanxi, just south of the Great Wall, in October 1935, and joining forces with some other Communist troops who had already made a base there.

It had been an exhausting and astonishing year since they left Jiangxi, and now Mao had to chart out in his mind a new course for the Communists and for his own career. He was also to be a father again. He Zizhen became pregnant for the fifth time after the March ended, and their daughter Li Min was born in the Shaanxi village of Baoan in the late summer of 1936. “The Maos were proud parents of a new baby girl,” as Edgar Snow, the first Westerner ever to interview Mao, jotted in his notes at that time. As had not been the case with any of He Zizhen’s other children, she and Mao—though separated—were to see Li Min grow up to maturity, marry, and raise two children of her own. Fate granted them at least that measure of continuity.

AFTER SOME HUNTING AROUND in Shaanxi for the most practical and defensible location, by the fall of 1936 the Communists had decided to make their headquarters in Yan‘an, a fair-sized market town, with good shelter nearby in the cave dwellings that peasants for centuries had built into the soft loess hillsides. Such dwellings were cheap to build and gave good protection from the extremes of heat and cold that afflicted this arid region. And in a countryside almost barren of trees, the need for timber was reduced to some simple framing for a rough screen and door that would shelter the cave dwellers from wind, dust, and the gaze of the outside world.

The fact that Mao lived in such a cave struck visitors to Yan‘an as symbolic of his revolutionary simplicity and fervor. In fact, it was an adjustment to circumstances, of a kind he had made many times before in his life, and Mao settled at once into this strangely desolate new home. He had after all lived for most of his life with none of the amenities of the modernizing urban world, though he had tasted them in Shanghai and Canton. He had time, too, to enjoy the company of his new daughter and to relish the news that Communists in Shanghai had been able to track down two of the children he had had with Yang Kaihui long before—Anying, who was now fourteen, and Anqing, who was thirteen. However, their youngest brother had died some time in those bleak years, and Anqing’s health had been badly damaged by his privations. The boys would be sent to Yan’an as soon as it could be safely arranged.