Mao: The Unknown Story Read online

  The Pitou “joint conference” was in fact little more than a family affair between the two brothers-in-law, and it duly gave Mao the endorsement to be the overlord of Red Jiangxi, with Lieu as his man on the spot. The leader of the Jiangxi Reds, Lee Wen-lin, was demoted to a lowly office job.

  Most Jiangxi Reds opposed these decisions, and Mao had to resort to terror to silence them. At Pitou he ordered the public execution of four well-known local Communists who were charged with being “counter-revolutionaries.” These were the first Communists murdered by Mao whose names are known.

  Mao and Brother-in-law Lieu used executions to scare off potential dissenters. One Party inspector reported at the time that Lieu constantly “burst out with wild abuse … saying things like ‘I’ll have you executed!’ ” One particular charge used to send victims to their death was a phrase in vogue in Stalin’s Russia — that the subject was a “rich peasant,” or “kulak.” Mao claimed that in Jiangxi, “Party organisations on all levels are filled with landlords and kulaks,” on the sole ground that most Jiangxi Red leaders came from affluent families. In fact, Mao himself belonged to a “kulak” family.

  The Chinese Communists had killed one another before, but hitherto most killings seem to have been settling clan or personal scores, using ideological labels. Mao’s killings were in order to further grander ambitions.

  WHILE MAO WAS muscling in on Jiangxi, he did his utmost not to alert Shanghai, which had granted him no mandate to take over the Jiangxi Reds. On the contrary, it gave the Jiangxi Red Army the status of a separate army, on a par with the Zhu — Mao Army, and appointed a man called Cai Shen-xi as its commander.

  When Cai arrived in Jiangxi, Mao refused to let him take up his post, and simply appointed his own brother-in-law Lieu to head the Jiangxi Army. Mao was able to conceal this from Shanghai because there was no telephone, radio or telegraph communication at the time. The only links were couriers, who took several weeks each way between Shanghai and the base. We have reason to believe that he and his brother-in-law Lieu murdered one uncooperative Party inspector called Jiang Han-bo, and then faked a report to Shanghai in Jiang’s name spouting Mao’s line.

  Mao’s plan was to create a fait accompli. Till now he had been writing regular servile letters to Shanghai. Now he stopped completely, and he ignored repeated summonses to go to Shanghai. To get Shanghai off his back it seems he even went so far as to spread a rumor that he had died of an illness. As Mao was a famous “bandit chief,” the news received wide coverage in the Nationalist press, which was a convenient way to float a story for which he could plausibly disown responsibility.

  The ploy was a success, in the short term. On 20 March an obituary framed in black appeared in Moscow in the Comintern magazine International Press Correspondence: “News has arrived from China that Comrade Mau Tze Dung … the founder of the Red Army, has died at the front in Fukien as a result of long-standing disease of the lungs.”

  But within a fortnight, Moscow and Shanghai discovered that Mao was alive and kicking, and furthermore had seized control of the Jiangxi Army. On 3 April, Shanghai issued a sharp circular to all Red Armies telling them that they must obey no one but Shanghai. The circular made a point of criticizing Mao (without naming him) for taking over the Jiangxi Red Army without authorization.

  When Shanghai’s document reached Jiangxi, the local Reds rose up against Mao in May. In some areas, cadres encouraged revolts by the peasants against the Mao — Lieu regime. Before Mao came, the Jiangxi Reds had paid attention to issues such as welfare and production, building a factory to make farm implements and household utensils. Mao and Lieu condemned these programs as “constructionism.” Lieu wrote that: “for the need of struggle, reducing production is unavoidable.” Deprived of the chance to raise output, and squeezed dry by taxes (which Lieu claimed they “jumped up with joy to pay”), the peasants rebelled in district after district, raising slogans like “Give us a quiet life and quiet work!” Lieu crushed the revolts mercilessly: “As soon as anyone is spotted wavering or misbehaving, they are to be arrested,” he ordered. “There must be no feelings for relatives or friends. Anyone who comes to your home or anywhere else who does not behave correctly … you must report … to the authorities so they can be seized and punished …”

  Lieu claimed that the revolts were led by “AB elements [who] have become Party branch secretaries.” “AB,” standing for Anti-Bolshevik, was the name of a defunct Nationalist group, which Lieu spuriously resuscitated to condemn local dissenters. Within a month, thousands of peasants and Communists had been killed.

  At this moment, an opportunity opened up for the Jiangxi Reds. At the beginning of August 1930, Mao and his army were hundreds of kilometers away, near Changsha, trying to take over Peng De-huai’s army. The Jiangxi Reds, led by their old chief Lee Wen-lin, seized the chance, convened a meeting and fired Lieu. A boisterous audience booed and barracked Lieu — and through him Mao — for “only thinking about power,” as Lieu later admitted to Shanghai, “becoming warlords” and “putting the Party in great danger.” Lieu was denounced for executing “too many” of their comrades, and for creating “an immense Red terror.”

  The locals called on Shanghai to expel Lieu from the Party. But, lacking killer instinct, they let him go to Shanghai, which gave him a post in another Red base. There he met his match. The boss there, Chang Kuo-tao, was as baleful as Mao himself, and did his own slaughtering, during which Lieu was killed. After Lieu left, his wife, Mao’s sister-in-law Ho Yi, went back to Mao’s brother Tse-tan.

  With the sacking of Lieu, Mao had lost his man in Jiangxi. After he wound up the siege of Changsha, he returned to Jiangxi to reassert control — and take revenge. En route, on 14 October, he denounced the Jiangxi Reds to Shanghai: “The entire Party [there] is under the leadership of kulaks … filled with AB … Without a thorough purge of the kulak leaders and of AB … there is no way the Party can be saved …”

  It was just at this time that Mao learned that Moscow had given him the ultimate promotion — making him head of the future state. His aggressive pursuit of power had won him appreciation. Now that he had Moscow’s blessing, Mao decided to embark on a large-scale purge, get rid of all who had opposed him, and in the process generate such terror that no one would dare disobey him from now on. Shanghai was in no position to restrain him, as in mid-November a fierce power struggle broke out there among the leadership, brought about by a relative unknown called Wang Ming, who in future years would be a major challenger of Mao’s.

  IN LATE NOVEMBER, Mao started his slaughter. He ordered all the troops to gather in the center of the Red territory, where it was hard to escape. There, he claimed that an AB League had been uncovered in the branch under Peng De-huai — which in fact contained people who had resisted being taken over by Mao. Arrests and executions began. One interrogator wrote in his unpublished memoirs how an officer who had led an attempt to leave Mao’s fold was tortured: “the wounds on his back were like scales on a fish.”

  Mao had a score to settle with the Zhu — Mao Army too, since it had voted him out as its chief the year before. Quite a lot of Red Army officers had reservations about Mao, evinced in what an officer called Liou Di wrote to Shanghai on 11 January 1931: “I never trusted Mao,” he wrote. After one battle, “I met many officers in different army units … They were all very uneasy, and looked dejected. They said they did not know working in the Communist Party required them to learn sycophancy, and that it was really not worth it. I felt the same, and considered that the Bolshevik spirit of the Party was being sapped day by day …” Mao was accused of “the crime of framing and persecuting comrades,” and of “being a wicked schemer,” as he admitted to Shanghai on 20 December 1930.

  To run the purge, Mao used a crony called Lie Shau-joe, deemed by his comrades to be “vicious and dirty.” “Lie is disliked by most of the troops,” one Party inspector had written, “because he is all bravado haranguing the men before a battle, but cowardly in battle.”
People working under him had been begging the Party to “fire him and punish him.”

  Lie proceeded by first arresting a few people, and then using torture to get them to name others; then came more arrests, more torture, and more of Mao’s foes scooped up. According to a senior officer, Lie and his men would “simply announce ‘You have AB among you,’ and would name people … no other evidence at all; these people … were tortured and forced to admit [they were AB], and also to give the names of a dozen or so other people. So those other people were arrested and tortured and they gave scores more names …”

  Mao wrote to Shanghai himself on 20 December that in the space of one month “over 4,400 AB have been uncovered in the Red Army.” Most were killed — and all were tortured, Mao acknowledged. He argued that if victims were unable to stand torture and made false confessions, that itself proved they were guilty. “How could loyal revolutionaries possibly make false confessions to incriminate other comrades?” he asked.

  Once he had tightened his grip on the army, Mao turned his attention to the Jiangxi Communists. On 3 December he sent Lie with a list of his foes to the town of Futian, where the Jiangxi leaders were living. Mao condemned the meeting in August which had expelled his ally Lieu as an “AB meeting” which “opposed Mao Tse-tung.” “Put them all down,” he ordered, and then “slaughter en masse in all counties and all districts.” “Any place that does not arrest and slaughter, members of the Party and government of that area must be AB, and you can simply seize and deal with them [xun-ban, implying torture and/or liquidation].”

  Lie arrived at Futian on 7 December, arrested the men on Mao’s list and tortured them through the night. One method was called “striking landmines,” which slowly broke the thumb with excruciating pain. Another technique, also slow, so as to maximize the pain, was to burn victims with flaming wicks. Lie was particularly vicious towards the wives of the Jiangxi leaders. They were stripped naked and, according to a protest written immediately afterwards, “their bodies, particularly their vaginas, were burned with flaming wicks, and their breasts were cut with small knives.”

  These atrocities ignited a mutiny, the first ever openly to challenge Mao. It was led by the above-mentioned senior officer, Liou Di, who actually came from Hunan and had known Mao for some years. Because of his Hunan origins, Mao had earlier wanted to enlist him on his side to help control part of the Jiangxi Army. Mao’s man Lie summoned Liou Di on 9 December, first claiming that he had been identified as AB, then promising to let him off the hook if he would collaborate.

  In a letter to Shanghai after the revolt, Liou Di described what happened. He saw the torturers tucking in at a banquet of “drinks, meats and hams,” with their victims laid out at their feet, and heard Lie brag about his torturing “cheerfully, in high spirits,” to flattering noises from the others. Carried away, Lie let slip that the whole thing “was not a question of AB, but all politics.” “I arrived at the firm conclusion that all this had nothing to do with AB,” Liou wrote. “It must be Mao Tse-tung playing base tricks and sending his running dog Lie Shau-joe here to slaughter the Jiangxi comrades.”

  Liou Di decided to try to stop Mao, but he had to employ subterfuge: “if I were to act as a Communist and deal with them honestly, only death would await me. So I shed my integrity … and switched to a Changsha accent [to assert his non-Jiangxi identity], and told Lie: ‘I’m an old subordinate of Your Honor … I will do my best to obey your political instructions.’ ” He also pledged allegiance to Mao. “After I said this,” he wrote, “their attitude changed straight away … They told me to wait in a small room next door …” Lying there in bed that night, with the screams of a tortured comrade coming through the wall, Liou Di planned his moves.

  Next morning, he stepped up his flattery of Lie, and managed to gain his freedom. Lie told him to go back and “eliminate all the AB in your regiment at once.” When he got back, Liou Di told his fellow officers what he had seen and heard, and obtained their support. On the morning of the 12th, he gathered his troops, raided the prison at Futian and released the victims. Not being a killer, he did not pursue Mao’s cronies, all of whom, including Lie, got away. Lie, though, was later killed by an avenger.

  That night, posters went up in Futian saying “Down with Mao Tse-tung!” and the next morning an anti-Mao rally was held. In the afternoon the Jiangxi men left town and moved across the River Gan to put themselves out of Mao’s reach. They sent out a circular with this description of Mao:

  He is extremely devious and sly, selfish, and full of megalomania. To his comrades, he orders them around, frightens them with charges of crimes, and victimises them. He rarely holds discussions about Party matters … Whenever he expresses a view, everyone must agree, otherwise he uses the Party organisation to clamp down on you, or invents some trumped-up theories to make life absolutely dreadful for you … Mao always uses political accusations to strike at comrades. His customary method regarding cadres is to … use them as his personal tools. To sum up … not only is he not a revolutionary leader, he is not a … Bolshevik.

  Mao’s goal, they said, was to “become Party Emperor.”

  However, an envoy from Shanghai happened to be present, and told them to stop denouncing Mao in public, on the grounds that Mao had “an international reputation.” They obeyed at once, and entrusted their fate to Shanghai: “We must report Mao Tse-tung’s evil designs and his slaughter of the Jiangxi Party to the Centre, for the Centre to resolve it,” they told their troops.

  The delegates they sent to Shanghai were all people who had been tortured by Mao’s men. There they presented the Party leadership with evidence hard to impugn — their torture scars. Moreover, they said, Mao “did not carry out the [leadership’s repeated] instructions. He … has ignored comrades sent by the Centre and deliberately created problems for them … The Centre wrote several times to try to transfer Mao Tse-tung, but he simply ignored the letters.”

  But Moscow’s envoys and the Shanghai leadership, headed by Chou En-lai, backed Mao, even though they knew the charges against him were true, and had seen the marks of torture at first hand. Chou himself told Moscow’s man, the Pole Rylsky, that “the arrests and torture of members of our Party … did in fact take place.” But in the Stalinist world, a purger was always the victor, as Moscow was looking out for the hardest people. The Jiangxi Reds, though loyal to the Party, were labeled “counter-revolutionaries” and ordered to submit to Mao or face “ruthless armed struggle,” i.e., annihilation. Mao was “fundamentally correct,” Moscow said, adding that “this line of ruthless struggle against the enemies of the revolution must [be continued].” This was another milestone for Mao: he had won backing from Moscow for murdering his fellow Party members, who had done absolutely nothing wrong vis-à-vis their Party. They had not killed or wounded a single Party member, while Mao had trampled all over the Party’s rules.

  Shanghai even sent the victims’ appeals against Mao back to him — a signal to Mao that he was at liberty to punish them in whatever way he desired. On these heart-rending reports, a spidery hand minuted the words: “After translation [into Russian], return to Mao.” Or, simply: “To Mao.” These words were in the hand of the head of the Organization Department, Kang Sheng. A lean, mustachioed man with gold-rimmed spectacles, a connoisseur of Chinese art and erotica, with an equally discerning eye for the range of pain produced by torture and torment, Kang was later to achieve infamy as Mao’s persecutor designate. Now, with these indifferent yet sinister words, he consigned the victims to Mao — and certain death.

  With this encouragement from Shanghai, Mao had Liou Di and his fellow mutineers “tried” and executed. Before they died, they were paraded round the Red area as a deterrent to the locals. Representatives from all over the base were brought to watch the executions as a lesson.

  Red Jiangxi was ravaged, as a later secret report revealed: “All work was stopped in order to slaughter AB.” “Everyone lived in fear … At the fiercest, two people talking togethe
r would be suspected of being AB … All those who were not demonic in striking AB were treated as AB …” Appalling torture was commonplace: “There were so many kinds … with strange names like … ‘sitting in a pleasure chair,’ ‘toads drinking,’ ‘monkeys holding a rope.’ Some had a red-hot gun-rod rammed into the anus … In Victory County alone, there were 120 kinds of torture.” In one, termed with sick inventiveness “angel plucking zither,” a wire was run through the penis and hung on the ear of the victim, and the torturer then plucked at the wire. There were also horrible forms of killing. “In all counties,” the report said, “there were cases of cutting open the stomach and scooping out the heart.”

  Altogether, tens of thousands died in Jiangxi. In the army alone, there were about 10,000 deaths — about a quarter of the entire Red Army under Mao at the time — as revealed by the secret report immediately afterwards. It was the first large-scale purge in the Party, and took place well before Stalin’s Great Purge. This critical episode — in many ways the formative moment of Maoism — is still covered up to this day. Mao’s personal responsibility and motives, and his extreme brutality, remain a taboo.

  Next door in Fujian, the local Reds had also rebelled against Mao, voting out his followers in July 1930 while he and his army were away. Many thousands were now executed; the figure, just taking those whose names are known and who were later officially cleared, is 6,352. In one county the victims were hauled through the streets to their execution with rusty wires through their testicles. Frightened and thoroughly disillusioned, the head of Red Fujian fled at the first opportunity, when he was sent to Hong Kong to buy medicine. He was only one of many senior Communists who deserted. Another was Peng De-huai’s de facto adopted son.