The Long March

‘Maybe the ghosts of the landlords,’ one said. ‘They were all killed. Even their children were gone.’

‘They did come up with more,’ the second man corrected him.

‘You call those landlords?’ the third one almost shouted. ‘None of them had more than ten dan of rice, barely enough for a family of five to scrape by on. But then anything could turn a man into a landlord, a pig in the pigsty, a farm hand, some extra cash, or a better harvest by hard work. It was a farce.’

Watching and listening to the three men, I felt they were like a string trio, each following his part, but all fitting together. It amazed me that they talked with such vigour about things that had happened seventy-three years earlier, but they and their parents and grandparents must have pondered the same questions for so long.

So why did they think the Party trumped up the charges? I had always thought landlords were evil and deserved the punishment doled out to them. It never occurred to me that enemies could just be created.

‘They were doing it to keep us on our toes. Campaigns, campaigns and more campaigns. Each time some fellows were bumped off, the rest thought they had better behave otherwise it would be their turn next. People lived in fear, and that was what they wanted.’

I found out later that in the first five months of the Land Investigation drive, 5,680 ‘new enemies’ were discovered in the Red base, and were punished by fines, imprisonment, hard labour or death.11 At its peak in the summer of 1933, when Chiang was about to launch his Fifth Campaign, another 13,620 landlords and rich peasants were identified in just three months. Their punishment was spelled out in this directive by the Political Department of the Red Army:

Besides immediately confiscating their grain, oxen, pigs … we order them to hand in fines to supply the workers’ and peasants’ Revolution, in order to show the sincerity of their repentance and obedience … Also they have to write a statement of repentance. If they do not hand in the fines before the deadline and do not contact us, they will be considered definite reactionaries. Then besides burning all their houses, and digging up and destroying their family tombs, we will make a pronouncement asking all people to arrest them. Their families will be punished by death.12

By now, landlords and rich peasants accounted for over 10% of the three million people in the Jiangxi Red base – 300,000 people. On top of this there were the alleged ABs and other suspects who were thought to be hiding inside the Party. They knew their likely fate, and the best thing was to run. The three old men used a phrase that I had heard before but was puzzled by: ‘The water began to flow upstream.’ It turned out to be a local description of the flood of people who left the Jiangxi base and went to the Nationalist-held territories. We had always learned that the people went out of their way to support the Red Army and the Soviet, as the mural in the Yudu Martyrs’ Museum showed, but from the summer of 1933 hundreds of thousands of people fled. In Futian Village, very few managed to escape because the Party kept a close eye on them. Elsewhere the Party was powerless to stop the exodus.

It began with the landlords; then it was the peasants; and finally whole villages or even districts disappeared. ‘Shangtang district has 6,000 people, and more than 2,000 have gone to the White area, taking their pigs, chickens, pots, tools and even their dogs. How can we stop it?” the county Party secretary asked in Ruijin.13 The woman at the Martyrs’ Museum told me that tens of thousands also ran away from Yudu County. The county and district officials were dismissed because they could not stop it. Most of them were killed. Their bodies were flung into the river at night and were still there in the morning, turning in the current.

Soon frightened officials and militiamen joined the flight too, taking more people and even weapons with them. Worse still, some people came back with the advancing Nationalist troops as scouts, guides and spies. Chiang's overwhelming forces were already crushing the Red Army. With the additional intelligence Chiang now had, the Army had even less chance. The physical capacity of the Jiangxi base was exhausted. Whatever support the Communists still enjoyed they had squandered with the purges. They could not possibly hold out and consequently had to leave and go on the March.

Incredibly, before they did so, the Party ordered yet another purge. It was to clear up the remains of the ‘class enemies’ in the Army, to strengthen discipline and prevent desertion, and among those who would stay behind, to make sure they were loyal. Several thousands, including many Communist intellectuals, officers and captured Nationalist commanders, were rounded up in a dozen centres in Ruijin. After interrogation, they were taken to a military court deep in the mountains, where they heard this verdict: ‘You have committed serious crimes against the Revolution. We cannot have people like you. We are now sending you home.’14 They were ordered to walk to a huge pit nearby, where men waited to chop their heads off, and then kick them into the pit. The killing continued for two months after the Long March began.

The gruesome history of the last purge and what had gone before in the Jiangxi Soviet was recorded in painful detail by Gong Chu. I had read his memoir The Red Army and I some time before; knowing he wrote it after he left the Red Army and the Party in 1934, I was unsure of him. How much could I trust the account of a ‘traitor’, who had to justify himself and what he had done? He revealed so many shocking stories – how the Red Army burned and looted to survive, how officers walked around after a battle to finish off anyone who was still alive; how a top commander was denounced for eating meat and playing poker; and how everyone lived in total fear in the Jiangxi Soviet. I simply could not associate them with the Party. Twenty years of Communist upbringing had left their stamp on me, when all I was told, heard and read was the good things the Party did.

But after talking to the survivors, seeing the legacy of history, finding out about events that did not appear in textbooks, and listening to tales that people would not forget as long as they lived – everything convinced me of the validity of these stories. In the 1980s, President Yang Shangkun, himself a witness of the purge in Jiangxi, asked officials to investigate and he was told that Gong's book was ‘fairly accurate’. Re-reading the book on my journey, I could understand what made Gong give up the Communist cause. This was the reason he gave:

Every day I had nightmares. I seemed to have the images of tens of thousands of people floating in front of me. They were groaning, they were crying, they were screaming, they were struggling, and they were rebelling. I doubted they were nightmares because I had witnessed them.15

I returned to Yudu the next day in the early evening. The sun had, as we say, lost its poison, no longer burning with the heat of day. I strolled past Mao's residence back towards the river. His choice of that tiny courtyard now made sense. Perhaps nobody would think of leaving him behind, but he did not want to take the slightest chance. When he was told the Red Army was to leave from Yudu, he came here to wait rather than stay in Ruijin. And in Yudu he chose a house which could hardly have been closer to the nearest crossing point. He could not be without the Army he had created, the revolution he had led. He was confident he would rise again, and with this Army he would rebound and realize his ambition.

At about six o'clock in the evening on 18 October 1934 Mao left his house walking alongside the stretcher he had built for himself – two long bamboo poles with hemp ropes zigzagging across them, and thin sticks curved in arches over them, covered with a sheet of oilcloth to keep off the sun and rain.16 He would need it. He had not fully recovered from his malaria, though the best doctor from Ruijin had got him just about fit to travel.

He joined the Central Column with his bodyguards, secretaries and cook, and the porters who carried his stretcher. His wife, seven months pregnant, was assigned to the convalescent unit; she would be carried on a stretcher throughout the March. He left his 2-year-old son behind with his brother and sister-in-law – no children were allowed. This was the second child he had had to leave, and he never saw either of them again. Mao was also leaving the base which he had set up and fought for, the place where he had gained and lost his political eminence. He walked towards the river, into the dusk of evening.

FOUR Mist over the Xiang River

CHIANG KAISHEK'S PLANE soared into the air from Nanchang, the provincial capital of Jiangxi. It was 15 October 1934. The Central Daily headline read, ‘Chiang Confident He Will Get Reds’. It compared the Communists to the faltering end of an arrow's flight. Chiang looked down at the land, the green hills and meandering rivers of Jiangxi, and had a sense of relief, even jubilation. For almost a year, he had been in Nanchang, taking personal charge of the Fifth Campaign, which he thought would take care of the Communists once and for all. He felt free to tour the north and to spread his ideas for running China, unaware that Mao and his men were escaping under his nose and at that very moment. Still less did he know how easily the 86,000 men and women had broken through his lines of defence.

The biggest culprit was Chen Jitang, the warlord of Guangdong, the first province the Red Army had to pass through from Jiangxi. He had defied Chiang's economic blockade of the Red area by trading tungsten with the Communists. He did not like the Communists – he killed over 10,000 of them in Canton between 1931 and 1935 because they dared to challenge his rule – but he hated Chiang just as much, knowing his ultimate goal was to finish off all the warlords. He held anti-Chiang oath sessions with his officers, when they drank wine mixed with chicken blood, shouted ‘Down with the biggest dictator’, and then thrashed straw men or wooden sticks representing him. On 6 October 1934, immediately before the commencement of the Long March, he signed a secret treaty which agreed a ceasefire, exchange of intelligence, free trade, and right of way for the Red Army – his troops would retreat 20 kilometres from the route of the March. He presented a parting gift of 1,200 boxes of bullets, which had been airdropped by Chiang for him to fight the Communists. Even his nephew could not understand, saying, ‘Good grief, you let the Communists escape before your own eyes. I thought you hated them.’1

His neighbours, the warlords of Guangxi, Li and Bai, were even more hostile to Chiang. They made their first bid to oust him in 1929, but were sold out by their allies, who were bribed by Chiang with a few million silver dollars. As the Chinese say, if you have money, you can make ghosts work for you – let alone unscrupulous warlords. Li and Bai openly claimed, ‘Chiang hates us more than he does Mao and Zhu. If Mao and Zhu exist, we exist; if they are gone, we will be gone too. Why should we create this opportunity for him? We let Mao and Zhu live, and we will live too.’2 Chiang appointed Li as Commander of the Southern Route to chase the Red Army, with an up-front payment of three quarters of a million yuan, and then half million a month for his army, plus 100 heavy machines guns, 40 cannons and 1,000 boxes of bullets. He sent back a cable to confirm his acceptance and took his payment; but he did not lift a finger to organize the chase.

Chiang was exasperated, but he came up with what he thought was a perfect plan. He had just the excuse to enter the warlords’ territories and take control of them. He even became excited by the opportunity – the other half of China, from Guangdong in the south, Guizhou and Yunnan in the south-west, and Sichuan the biggest trophy of all, might be his at the end of the day. He spelled out his plan: ‘We do not have to wage war to conquer Guizhou … Henceforward if we do the right thing … we can unify the country.3 Chiang and the warlords were, as we say, sharing the same bed but with different dreams. Chiang could not wait to get into the warlords’ turf and attack the Red Army at the same time; the warlords wanted to speed the Red Army on its way to deny Chiang just such an excuse.

The Red Army could not move fast. Liu Bocheng, the Chief of Staff sacked by Braun, compared the March to an emperor's sedan chair. Carrying it at the front were the 1st and 3rd Corps; behind were the 8th and 9th, with the 5th Corps guarding the rear. In the middle were the Military Commission and the Central Column. The Military Commission had over 4,000 staff from the communications, logistics, engineers, artillery, hospital and cadet units, and the Red Army political department. The Central Column consisted of the Jiangxi Red government, reduced in size but with all its key functions intact, and 7,000 reserves and porters carrying files and cupboards, the entire content of the Ruijin Library, the Red Army's reserves of silver and gold in 200 battered kerosene cans, sewing machines, printing equipment, repair plant, and the cumbersome X-ray machine packed carefully in a coffin-size box which alone needed two dozen men to carry it. As Edgar Snow said, it was a nation on the move, 86,000 men and women with everything they might need in their new base. The autumn rains which fell at this time of year for days on end did not help either. The columns only managed three kilometres on the first day.

The rain and the march, even at a snail's pace, did not dampen Soldier Huang's spirits. He was excited by his first foray into the big world. They slept by day and marched at night to avoid the Nationalist planes, although there were none to be seen. At first he found it hard and kept dozing off and falling. One night his bamboo torch scorched his hair, but he soon got the hang of it. He found the march a pleasant change from battles, cannon fire, bombing raids and the dreaded turtle-shells. ‘The enemy seemed to have evaporated,’ he said. ‘I wondered why the leaders hadn't got us out and marching earlier. It would have saved a lot of lives.’

After a few days, the accents of the people in the towns and villages they passed through began to change and Huang became concerned. Where were they going? How long were they going away for? Were they coming back? Nobody knew. His commissar told them, ‘We belong to the Party. Wherever the Party points, we will go.’ But when the local dialect became completely incomprehensible, he was really worried. He did not know they had already left Jiangxi and were in Guangdong Province. He kept stopping and looking back, maybe trying to remember the route or just missing his home – he was not sure. He had to be pushed back into the marching column. And then after five weeks, they were in a strange land of green cone-shaped hills wreathed in mist, rearing up above gleaming rivers. To the Chinese, this was, and still is, a paradise on earth – Guilin in Guangxi Province, south-west China. But to Huang and his comrades, it meant they were too far from home, and they wanted to go back.

Right from the beginning, desertion was a serious problem. Woman Wang remembered the warning from their political commissar in the Central Column before they set off: ‘Comrades, we are entering the White area … You should be extra careful. Do not fall behind. Don't be tempted by the enemy's propaganda. And be vigilant about deserters.’4 But the caution had little effect on the reserves and the porters, who were the first to desert. Party documents, cupboards, costumes and sets for plays, and pots and pans were dumped. Heavy equipment such as the printing machines was carried first by eight, then six, then four men; finally it had to be abandoned or buried. There were not enough porters to carry the X-ray machine, the prize possession of the Red Army hospital. In the end, Mao persuaded them to bury it: ‘When the whole country is ours, you will have as many X-ray machines as you like. Chiang will have prepared them for you. Don't worry about it now.’

Wang could not relinquish her wounded, not a single one. She had twelve porters to carry her six officers. She chatted with them like a sister, offering them her own ration of rice, and boiled water for them to soak their feet at the end of the day. Just three days into the march, one of them begged to be released – he was missing his wife and children. Wang told him of the importance of his work for the Revolution, but he would not listen.

‘Whose revolution?’ he retorted. ‘How can I protect my home and my children by abandoning them?’ One night he complained of a stomach problem and disappeared.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.