The Red Flag: A History of Communism (49 page)

As in the Soviet Union, some accepted that purges were necessary, and that their thoughts had needed reform. Dou Shangchu, a regimental commander of the People’s Liberation Army, admitted that the rectification had forced him to change his old-fashioned attitudes to marriage; his future wife would have to be politically reliable and somebody he loved, not just an obedient homemaker.
⁷²
Others found it deeply unpleasant. As one Yan’an veteran reminisced: ‘You had to write down what X or Y had said, as well as what you yourself had said that was supposed to be not so good. You had to dig into your memory endlessly and write endlessly. It was most loathsome.’
⁷³

The rectification soon escalated into a more violent campaign of repression.
⁷⁴
This was partly because the Communists were under increasing military pressure from the Guomindang, following the effective end of the alliance in 1941, and paranoia reigned. But Mao and his own Ezhov – Kang Sheng – were also responsible. The sinister Kang – Mao’s ‘pistol’ as he was sometimes called – came from an elite background and was a cultivated man: a poet, calligrapher, connoisseur of erotic literature and Song dynasty pots. He had lived in the Hotel Lux throughout much of the 1930s, and had worked with the Soviet secret police to spy on the Chinese in Moscow. He was one of the Returned Students flown to Yan’an with Wang Ming, and had an unusually cosmopolitan appearance, wearing a moustache, a Soviet-style black leather jacket, and with a preference for high black leather boots and riding crop. He also had a fondness for black Pekinese dogs and employed the chef who had prepared delicacies for the last emperor.
⁷⁵
Yet despite his Soviet connections and pantomime-villain habits, Kang enjoyed a close relationship with Mao, whom he helped with his poetry and calligraphy. He soon became the head of the security service in Yan’an, the euphemistically named ‘Social Affairs Department’. Kang claimed that the rectification campaign had exposed
the presence of spies in the party’s ranks, and with Mao’s support he launched a ‘rescuing the fallen’ campaign, which used torture, round-the-clock interrogations and terrifying mass ‘struggle’ meetings to force confessions. This was no repetition of Stalin’s Terror – there were relatively few executions – but the campaign, which Mao had promised would be educational, not repressive, caused deep anxieties amongst some leaders. Ultimately Mao was embarrassed by the episode and apologized for ‘excesses’.

The ‘rescue’ campaign may have done more to damage Mao within the party than help him, but by 1943 his power was secure. After years of expert manipulation of party politics, he had emerged triumphant, and he had established a new charismatic form of leadership – the first leader to rival the status of Lenin and Stalin.
⁷⁶
‘Mao Zedong Thought’ was declared to be the ideology of the party, and the famous anthem ‘The East is Red’ was adapted from an old love song:

It is important to remember, though, that despite his pretensions Mao was not the only guerrilla leader during the period, and Yan’an was not the only Communist base. Chinese Communism was a polycentric movement, and the Long Marchers left behind a number of smaller armies scattered throughout Southern and Central China which succeeded in tying down many of Chiang Kaishek’s forces. Their experience was very different to that of the Yan’anites, and they were forced to adopt different tactics, eschewing peasant mobilization and relying on traditional ‘feudal’ and clan networks.
⁷⁸

It was the Yan’an experience, however, that was ultimately to prove most influential on the party. In future years Mao was to try to resuscitate its spirit, most notably during the Cultural Revolution, but in the shorter term it gave the party the cohesion to exploit the chaos of the war. But the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 was perhaps most crucial in delivering ultimate victory to the Communists. The Communists could present themselves to the peasants as defenders of their localities against the Japanese.
⁷⁹
They therefore enlisted the support of some
Chinese in guerrilla actions, whilst avoiding head-on military confrontations. Meanwhile, the conventional military machine of their Guomindang rivals was worn down by the superior Japanese forces.
⁸⁰

The Communists had used the war against the Japanese to expand the areas under their control, but when the Japanese were defeated in 1945 they were still in a relatively weak position, largely confined to the north-western periphery of China. The Guomindang controlled most of China, including the urban centres, had the support of the United States and was recognized by the USSR, which tried to force the Communists to forge another United Front with the nationalists. When the Soviets withdrew from Manchuria in the spring of 1946, fighting for control soon broke out between the Communists and the Guomindang, and the Chinese civil war began. The Communists played a weak hand well. They benefited from renewed Soviet help, but they also had some success in mobilizing peasants against landlords with promises of rent reductions, though it did take some time to persuade them to break with tradition and challenge their landlords.
⁸¹

From 1946, Mao pressed for radical land redistribution in Communist-occupied areas, and this undoubtedly helped the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to secure support and recruits in some areas, especially the North. Communist ‘work teams’ arrived in villages and set up Poor Peasant Associations, with whose help they would try to determine the class of the villagers. They would then encourage poor and middle peasants to participate in ‘struggle meetings’, in which they would ‘speak bitterness’ against, and often physically attack, their landlords. In one village in the northern Shanxi province the main target was Sheng Jinghe, the wealthiest man in the community, who had grown rich from money-lending and skimming from gifts to local temples:

As this episode shows, long-festering resentments could explode into violent anger, and peasants sometimes behaved in a more radical way than the Communists intended.
⁸³
In areas occupied by the Communists, richer peasants were often influential supporters, and the Communists could not afford to lose them. And in Southern China, where the Communists were weaker, there was much less conflict between rich and poor. Other leaders – and especially Mao’s number two, Liu Shaoqi – pressed, successfully, for a less divisive approach.
⁸⁴
Liu was born near Mao’s native village in Hunan, and knew him as a youth. But he was better educated and more cosmopolitan than Mao, and went to study in Moscow at the Stalin School in the early 1920s. Like Mao, he had had his arguments with Moscow in the 1930s, but he remained on the Modernist side of the Marxist divide. He saw the rational, bureaucratic state he had witnessed Lenin trying to build as the model for the new China, not Mao’s sect-cum-guerrilla band. By late 1947 Mao himself agreed that class struggle had to be moderated in the name of national consensus: rent reductions could be more effective in dividing the peasantry from the Guomindang.
⁸⁵

The peasantry, then, was difficult to mobilize, and the party’s propaganda, featuring serried ranks of peasants marching to power, red banners aloft, was far from the truth. Most peasants were observers of, not participants in, revolution, and many obeyed the Communists because they were punished if they did not.
⁸⁶
Much more important in Mao’s victory were the Communist fighters themselves. It was youth, rather than poverty, that predicted peasants’ willingness to join the Communists, though the party itself discriminated against the wealthier, and by the end of the civil war the ranks of the party largely comprised poor peasants.
⁸⁷

The most systematic contemporary study of Chinese Maoist guerrillas
was carried out by the American anthropologist Lucien Pye, who interviewed sixty Chinese former Communist insurgents, most of them party members and low-level officials, in British Malaya in the early 1950s.
⁸⁸
The Communists he encountered were ‘an exceedingly alert group of people with very active minds’.
⁸⁹
Most were from a lowly background, though they were not from amongst the poorest. They were better educated than the norm (though only to school level), and were eager to better themselves. Yet their prospects were limited. Most were skilled workers, many on foreign-owned rubber plantations, and had little chance of betterment.
⁹⁰
They were dissatisfied with their status and the way their superiors treated them. They were also trying to realize their ambitions in a rapidly changing world. This led them, like the May 4th generation of urban intellectuals, to question their parents’ Confucian values. They were convinced that their parents’ world of filial piety and ritual would condemn them to low status and poverty; they wanted to be modern. They therefore relied more on peers than elders. Friends and male comradeship were important to them, and they often had charisma, becoming the informal leaders of their peer-groups.

They also lived in a chaotic world where politics mattered. With the Japanese invasion, the lives of ordinary people were clearly and directly affected by the world of high politics. Many of them had lost family members during the occupation. They felt they needed to become involved in politics, both to protect and to advance themselves. One option was to join one of the many community associations – secret societies, clans and trade organizations. But the Communist party offered something different. It was perceived as more reliable than traditional associations in helping its members; it seemed to make sense of the politics of the time and had a clear strategy. It was modern, yet not Western and ‘imperialist’, it was committed to the ordinary person – people like them
⁹¹
– it was well-organized and powerful, and it promised to help the Chinese assert themselves. As one said, ‘I thought their propaganda said that if I joined them, I would be like those who were running China. I knew the Communists were very powerful in China and no one dared oppose them.’ Communism and the October Revolution had shown how a poor, weak nation could suddenly become one of the great powers: as another explained, ‘Until the Chinese learned about the Russian Revolution, we were no good at politics and we made fools of ourselves. However, now the Chinese Communists have learned from the Russians how to have a
revolution, and no one laughs any more about the Chinese revolution.’
⁹²

Once they joined the party, Communists felt they had influence in the world: ‘It was as if I climbed on the back of a tiger,’ one declared. ‘It was very exciting and I had the power of the tiger; I moved as he moved.’ They did not at first object to party customs such as rectification. As eager self-improvers they were happy for the party to correct them, though they soon became anxious that group criticism might lead to a loss of status within the party. Indeed, for Communists brought up in a Confucian culture, a primary attraction of the party was the moral education it offered: ‘The political commissar told me he would help me learn about Marxism-Leninism, so that I would be able to get rid of my bad habits,’ one remembered.
⁹³

Maoist Marxism-Leninism served a number of other functions for the guerrillas. It could be a source of emotional sustenance in battle. The political commissar would frequently give long political lectures before fighting started, and each soldier would step forward with a clenched-fist salute, promising to sacrifice his life to the Marxist-Leninist cause. According to one soldier, ‘When we had all finished making our speeches, and I had told them that I wasn’t afraid to die a true revolutionary, it didn’t seem as though it would be very serious if we were all killed. That’s how fierce Marxism-Leninism is.’ The ideology was also seen in another way: as a special, esoteric knowledge, which showed how history worked and how to win the political struggle. The Malayan guerrillas were particularly impressed that the Communists had shared this valuable knowledge with them, unlike the selfish Westerners who kept the secrets of their success to themselves: