Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (39 page)

So Chiang and Mao came to the parting of the ways. Chiang became the supreme war-lord; the
KMT
was reorganized as a war-lord’s party, its members including (in 1929) 172,796 officers and men in the various armies, 201,321 civilians and 47,906 ‘overseas Chinese’, who supplied much of the money and some of its worst gangsters. As it won ground among the business community and the foreign interests, it lost ground among the peasants. Dr Sun’s widow left the
KMT
, went into exile in Europe and charged that her husband’s successors had ‘organized the
KMT
as a tool for the rich to get still richer and suck the blood of the starving millions of China …. Militarists and officials whom a few years ago I knew to be poor are suddenly parading about in fine limousines and buying up mansions in the Foreign Concessions for their newly acquired concubines.’ Chiang was a case in point. In July 1929 the
New York Times
correspondent noted that he paid a Peking hotel bill of US $17,000, for his wife, bodyguard and secretaries, for a fifteen-day stay, forking out a further $1,500 in tips and $1,000 bribes to the local police.
⁵¹

The moral Mao drew from Chiang’s change of policy was not an ideological but a practical one. To make any political impression in China, a man had to have an army. He would become a war-lord on his own account. He was extremely well-suited for this pursuit. Mao
was thirty-four in 1927: tall, powerfully built, the son of a cruel and masterful peasant who had fought and worked his way to affluence as a well-to-do farmer and grain merchant – a genuine
kulak
, in short. A contemporary at Tungshan Higher Primary School described Mao as ‘arrogant, brutal and stubborn’.
⁵²
He was not a millennarian, religious-type revolutionary like Lenin, but a fierce and passionate romantic, with a taste for crude and violent drama; an artist of sorts, cast from the same mould as Hitler, and equally impatient. Like Hitler, he was first and foremost a nationalist, who trusted in the national culture. From the philosopher Yen Fu he derived the idea that ‘culturalism’, the pursuit of ‘the Chinese Way’, was the means to mobilize her people into an irresistible force.
⁵³
He read and used Marxist-Leninism, but his fundamental belief was closer to the axiom of his ethics teacher at Peking, Yang Chang-chi, whose daughter became his first wife: ‘Each country has its own national spirit just as each person has its own personality …. A country is an organic whole, just as the human body is an organic whole. It is not like a machine which can be taken apart and put together again. If you take it apart it dies.’
⁵⁴

In Mao’s thinking, a form of radical patriotism was the mainspring. He never had to make the switch from internationalism to nationalism which Mussolini carried out in 1914: he was a nationalist
ab initio
, like Ataturk. And his cultural nationalism sprang not from a sense of oppression so much as from an outraged consciousness of superiority affronted. How could China, the father of culture, be treated by European upstarts as a wayward infant – a metaphor often used by the Western press in the 1920s. Thus the
Far Eastern Review
, commenting in 1923 on attempts to tax the British-American Tobacco monopoly: ‘The solution of the problem, of course, is concerted action of the powers in making it clear to these young politicians that trickery never got anything for a nation, that sooner or later the Powers grow weary of tricks and childish pranks and will set the house in order and spank the child.’
⁵⁵
In 1924 Mao took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the notorious sign in the Shanghai park, ‘Chinese and Dogs Not Allowed’. He interrupted a soccer game (against a Yale team) with a characteristic slogan, ‘Beat the slaves of the foreigners!’ and used an equally characteristic metaphor, if one of our foreign masters farts, it’s a lovely perfume!’ ‘Do the Chinese people know only how to hate the Japanese,’ he asked, ‘and don’t they know how to hate England?’
⁵⁶

Mao was not cast down by the difficulty of turning China, that helpless, prostrate beast of burden, into a formidable dragon again. This big, confident man, with his flat-topped ears and broad, pale
face – ‘a typical big Chinese’, according to a Burmese; ‘like a sea-elephant’, as a Thai put it – was an incurable optimist, who scrutinized the mystery of China for favourable signs. Dr Sun had thought China in a worse position than an ordinary colony: ‘ We are being crushed by the economic strength of the powers to a greater degree than if we were a full colony. China is not the colony of one nation but of all, and we are not the slaves of one country but of all. I think we should be called a hypo-colony.’ That was Stalin’s view also.
⁵⁷
But Mao thought the multiplicity of China’s exploiters an advantage, because one power could be set against another; he did not believe in the Leninist theory of colonialism. He argued ‘disunity among the imperialist powers made for disunity among the ruling groups in China’, hence there could be no ‘unified state power’.
⁵⁸

But all this analysis was mere words without an army. Mao accepted Chiang’s original view that the key to revolutionary success was to rouse the peasants. But peasants were as helpless as China herself until they were armed and trained, and forged into a weapon, as Genghis Khan had done. Was not Genghis a legitimate hero of a resurrected Chinese culture? It was part of Mao’s romantic nationalism, so similar to Hitler’s, that he scoured the past for exemplars, especially those who shared his own stress on force and physical strength.
⁵⁹
His very first article declared: ‘Our nation is wanting in strength. The military spirit has not been encouraged…. If our bodies are not strong we shall be afraid as soon as we see enemy soldiers, and then how can we attain our goals and make ourselves respected?’ ‘The principle aim of physical education’, he added, ‘is military heroism.’ The martial virtues were absolutely fundamental to his national socialism.
⁶⁰

In September 1927, following the break with the
KMT
, Mao was ordered by the Communist leadership to organize an armed rising among the Hunan peasants. This was his opportunity to become a war-lord, and thereafter he quickly turned himself into an independent force in Chinese politics. The revolt itself failed but he preserved the nucleus of a force and led it into the mountains of Chinghanshan, on the borders of Hunan and Kiangsi. It was small, but enough; thereafter he was never without his own troops. His appeal was crude but effective, systematizing the spontaneous land-grabbing which (though he was probably unaware of the fact) had destroyed Kerensky and made Lenin’s
putsch
possible. His Regulations for the Repression of Local Bullies and Bad Gentry and his Draft Resolution on the Land Question condemned the traditional enemies of poor peasants – ‘local bullies and bad gentry, corrupt officials, militarists and all counter-revolutionary elements in the villages’. He classified as ‘uniformly counter-revolutionary’ all the groups likely to oppose
his peasant-army: ‘All Right-Peasants, Small, Middle and Big Landlords’, categorized as ‘those possessing over 30
mou’
(4
acres). In fact he was setting himself up against all the stable elements in rural society, forming a war-band which was the social reverse of those commanded by gentry war-lords and their ‘local bullies’.

Mao showed himself better at appealing to peasant patriotism than Chiang, as Japanese war-archives were later to show.
⁶¹
But to begin with he could not recruit more than 1,000 poor peasants. He supplemented his force with 600 bandits, recruiting deliberately from the very scum of a society in the midst of civil war, what he called his ‘five
déclassé
elements’: deserters, bandits, robbers, beggars and prostitutes.
⁶²
As with other war-lords, his army fluctuated, from less than 3,000 to over 20,000. And he was as ruthless as any war-lord in killing enemies. In December 1930 he had between 2,000 and 3,000 officers and men in his army shot for belonging to the ‘
AB’
(Anti-Bolshevik League), a
KMT
undercover organization within the Communist forces. Five months earlier his wife and younger sister had been executed by the
KMT
and there were other deaths to avenge – Chiang had killed tens of thousands of Communists in 1927–8. But Mao never hesitated to take the initiative in using force. He had by the end of 1930 already created his own secret police (as his purge revealed) and when he felt it necessary he acted with complete ruthlessness and atrocious cruelty. The comparison between his ragged and savage band and Genghis’s ‘horde’ was not inapt, and to most of those whose fields he crossed he must have seemed like any other war-lord.
⁶³

Thus in the last years of the 1920s China was given over to the rival armies, motivated by a variety of ideologies or by simple greed – to their victims, what did it matter? After Chiang’s Northern campaign and the meeting of war-lords in Peking in 1928, one of the
KMT
commanders, Marshal Li Tsung-jen, declared: ‘Something new had come to changeless China … the birth of patriotism and public spirit.’ Within months these words had been shown to be total illusion, as the war-lords fell out with each other and the Nanking government. All parties found it convenient to fly the government and the
KMT
flag; none paid much regard to the wishes of either. Government revenue fell; that of the war-lords rose. As the destruction of towns and villages increased, more of the dispossessed became bandits or served war-lords, great and small, for their food. In addition to the half-dozen major war-lords, many lesser generals controlled a single province or a dozen counties, with armies ranging from 20,000 to 100,000; Mao’s was among the smallest of these. At the National Economic Conference on 30 June 1928, Chiang’s brother-in-law, T.V.Soong, now Minister of Finance, said that
whereas in 1911 under the monarchy China had an army of 400,000, more or less under single control, in 1928 it had eighty-four armies, eighteen independent divisions and twenty-one independent brigades, totalling over 2 million. The nation’s total revenue, $450 million, was worth only $300 million after debt-payments. The army cost each year $360 million, and if the troops were regularly paid, $642 million – hence banditry was inevitable. Yet a disarmament conference held the following January, designed to reduce the troops to 715,000, was a complete failure. Soong told it that, in the last year, twice as much money had been spent on the army as on all other government expenditure put together.
⁶⁴

In practice, the anguished people of China could rarely tell the difference between bandits and government troops. The number of those killed or who died of exposure or starvation was incalculable. Hupeh province showed a net population loss of 4 million in the years 1925–30, though there had been no natural famine and little emigration. The worst-hit province in 1929–30 was Honan, with 400,000 bandits (mostly unpaid soldiers) out of a total population of 25 million. In five months during the winter of 1929–30, the once-wealthy city of Iyang in West Honan changed hands among various bandit armies seventy-two times. An official government report on the province said that in Miench’ih district alone 1,000 towns and villages had been looted and 10,000 held to ransom: ‘When they capture a person for ransom they first pierce his legs with iron wire and bind them together as fish are hung on a string. When they return to their bandit dens the captives are interrogated and cut with sickles to make them disclose hidden property. Any who hesitate are immediately cut in two at the waist, as a warning to the others.’ The report said that families were selling children and men their wives. Or men ‘rented out’ their wives for two or three years, any children born being the property of the men who paid the rent. ‘In many cases only eight or ten houses are left standing in towns which a year ago had 400 or 450.’
⁶⁵

In desperation, the peasants built stone turrets with loopholes and crenellations, as look-outs and refuges for humans and cattle – rather like the peel towers of the fifteenth-century border in Britain. But even strongly walled towns were besieged and stormed. Choctow, only thirty miles from Peking, was besieged for eighty days and its 100,000 inhabitants starved; mothers strangled their new-born babies and girls were sold for as little as five Chinese dollars, and carried off into prostitution all over Asia. Liyang, in the heart of the Nanking government-controlled area, was stormed by a bandit force of 3,000, who looted $3 million and destroyed a further $10 million by fire. Six major towns in the Shanghai area were stormed and
looted. At Nigkang the chief magistrate was bound hand and foot and murdered by pouring boiling water over him. Strange practices from the past were resumed: bamboo ‘cages of disgrace’ were hoisted twenty feet into the air and hung from city walls, offenders having to stand on tiptoe with their heads sticking through a hole in the top. At Fushun in Shantung, a defeated war-lord retired into the city with his 4,500 troops, taking 10,000 hostages with him. During a thirteen-day siege by
KMT
units, over 400 women and children were tied to posts on the city walls, the defenders firing from behind them.