so powerful that the Emperor had to yield to their demands. It mattered little that he had only 600 men. As Mao said, ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire.’ He joined with two local bandit kings and managed to set up a base there.
His reputation spread. In May 1928, Zhu De, the Nationalist brigadier who had turned to Communism, brought Mao the remains of his troops from the failed Nanchang uprising. Six months later, they were joined by Peng Dehuai, who defected from the Nationalist army with 1,500 soldiers. Together they had 5,000 men, and made up the core of the Red Army, with Mao the head. This nascent army was too big for the Jinggang Mountains to support, so Mao decided to make a move and they found a new home in the flatter hills surrounding Ruijin.
The Red base in Jiangxi grew and grew, even spreading to neighbouring Fujian Province. On 7 November 1931 the Communists established the Chinese Soviet Republic, with Mao as the leader. He felt he deserved his position – he had provided a base, vision and hope for the Chinese Revolution – but he was soon to be disappointed. With help from the Communists’ spy-master who defected to him, Chiang wiped out the Party HQ in Shanghai. Many of those who survived decided to join Mao in Jiangxi, now the biggest Communist base in the country. Zhou Enlai arrived in Ruijin in August 1931, and all the top leaders followed; a nucleus was left in Shanghai just as a liaison with Moscow.
Mao soon began to feel the squeeze from the Party heavyweights. ‘After the men who had lived in foreign villas arrived, I was thrown into the cesspool …Really, it looked as though I had to prepare my funeral.’3 Zhou, always trusted by Moscow to obey orders, replaced him as the top man in the base. Zhang Wentian, the Red Professor, took over the running of the Jiangxi Soviet Government from Mao. He did not even bother to visit Mao for a year after he arrived in Ruijin. He confessed later, ‘I had no idea what sort of person Mao was, what he thought, and what he was good at. I had not the least interest in finding out either.’4 The 25-year-old Wang Jiaxiang, straight from his studies in Moscow, became head of the Red Army's political department. Finally, and most importantly, after only three years’ study in Moscow, Bo Gu became the protégé of the Communist Party's representative in the Comintern, and was made Party Secretary when he was no more than 25. For Mao, he was someone of no experience at all; Bo Gu did not think much of Mao either. ‘Marxism can't come out of country hills,’ he declared. Otto Braun, who was already in Jiangxi, and who never got on with Mao, threw his weight behind the Moscow-trained ‘Bolsheviks’.
Mao's loss of power has always been presented as the Party leaders pushing him aside. In October 1932, he was stripped of his role as Commissar of the Red Army, and only retained the nominal title of Chair of the People's Committee of the Jiangxi base. From then, till the Long March began in October 1934, Mao had no authority. How had he lost everything so quickly, so completely, when the Party owed him so much – their very survival? It was difficult to understand.
The old caretaker at Mao's house suggested I should visit the Yudu Revolutionary Martyrs’ Museum. ‘So many of us died for the Revolution. It is grand, the pride of the town,’ he said with his first show of animation. ‘You won't be disappointed there.’
This museum was easy to find, directly off Long March Avenue, the town's main thoroughfare. Three heroic statues in classic Socialist Realist style – a soldier, an officer and a peasant woman – stood in front of the entrance. The entrance hall was like a funeral parlour, packed with large wreaths dedicated to the martyrs. The exhibition was excellent, organized chronologically and replete with murals, paintings, maps, charts and statues. They showed all the martyrs, from the founders of the Yudu Communist Party to those who died in the Cultural Revolution.
I concentrated on the first few rooms, which dealt with the period running up to the Long March. This county was always criticized as politically backward. It lagged behind other counties in recruitment and procurement, and it failed to stop people fleeing to Nationalist-controlled areas. In 1932–3, the whole county government had been removed twice. I was surprised to see that Yudu had sent 68,519 men to the Red Army from 1929 to 1934, with 28,069 in the five months before the March. The contributions were displayed in a detailed chart, each district in a column as though they were competing in Communist fervour. Most imposing of all were the gigantic murals in red and gold showing heroic battle scenes, enthusiastic demonstrations, and memorials to the dead. They more than made up for any lack of artefacts. The red colour seemed to be there to remind us of the blood that was shed during the Revolution.
I was also struck by the youth of the early revolutionaries – they were nearly all in their late teens and early twenties. The expressions in their photographs and portraits were so determined, their eyes so piercing, their commitment so visible. I could almost feel their optimism and hope for a better future. Strangely, they almost all died in the same year – 1931.
I wondered what the big battles were in 1931 that led to the deaths of so many local Party leaders. Could they be Chiang's Second and Third Campaigns, both of which took place in 1931? No, they were brief and far from Yudu, well to the north of the Jiangxi base. Besides, the early martyrs were mostly local Party leaders who should not have been affected by the campaigns. I could not understand it, so I asked the staff member on duty in the room.
‘Oh, they died in the purge,’ she said.
‘Which purge?’ I asked.
‘The purge in the Jiangxi Soviet started by Chairman Mao,’ she said a little snappily, perhaps because of my ignorance. She then took me over to a bronze bust standing on a plinth on its own. It was like a Rodin, a thin young man, looking slightly dispirited and even a bit lost. All it said under the bust was his name and that he was killed mistakenly. ‘This is Xiao Dapeng. He was the Commander of the 20th Corps and his men started the Futian Incident.’
Suddenly everything clicked. I had read about the purge and the Futian Incident, but I had no idea the leader came from here. ‘He was so brave and died so young,’ she said with an air of pride. ‘If he had lived, I'm sure he would have made it big, definitely become a general. He was only in his twenties, a commander of a Corps when he was younger than I am now. What a waste.’
It was the very first Communist purge. When Mao came down from the Jinggang Mountains in the spring of 1929, Jiangxi already had a well-organized Communist Committee, with its headquarters in Futian Village, about 250 kilometres north of Ruijin. They were mostly educated local youth, and their revolution was milder, designed not to antagonize their families, relatives and clan members. Mao criticized them for being too conservative. ‘Leniency towards the enemy is a crime against the Revolution,’ he said famously. He put his brother-in-law in charge of them, but they deeply resented the intrusion; for them, it was not about policy, but about power. Tension ran high between the two groups. As the old saying goes, there cannot be two tigers on one mountain. When the locals threw out the brother-in-law, Mao decided to retaliate. In October 1930, he wrote to the Party HQ in Shanghai, denouncing the Jiangxi provincial Communists: ‘The entire Party [there] is under the leadership of rich peasants … Without a thorough purge of their leaders … there is no way the Party can be saved.’5
On 7 December 1930 Mao sent Li Shaojiu, Chairman of the Purge Committee he had set up in his army to Futian Village; Li arrested almost the entire Jiangxi Communist Committee, 120 members in all. They were held under suspicion of being members of the Anti-Bolshevik Clique, a defunct Nationalist organization. For the next five days they were tortured to make them confess. The tortures were barbaric – their flesh was burned with incense-sticks, they were hung up by the hands and beaten with split bamboo, bamboo splinters were forced under their fingernails, their hands were nailed on tables, burning rods were pushed up their backsides. They all ‘confessed’. Even so, forty of them were killed.
Two days later, Li Shaojiu descended on the HQ of the 20th Corps, a Jiangxi local guerrilla force. He conveyed Mao's instruction that there were Anti-Bolshevik members or ABs within the Corps and they must be rooted out. One of the targets, Commissar Liu Di, decided to stop it. As he later reported to the Party HQ in Shanghai: ‘I arrived at the firm conclusion that all this had nothing to do with ABs. It must be Mao