SUN SHUYUN

The Long March

To all the men and women on the Long March

CONTENTS

MAP

Prologue

ONEDrain the Pond to Catch the Fish

TWOTurtle-shell Power

THREEWater Flowing Upstream

FOURMist over the Xiang River

FIVEHungry Souls

SIXStarting Afresh

SEVENDon't Love Boys, Love Guns

EIGHTFire and Ice

NINEIn Tibetan Lands

TENDust into Gold

ELEVENThe End of the March

TWELVEThe Legion of Death

Epilogue

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Praise

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Every nation has its founding myth. For Communist China it is the Long March, for us a story on a par with Moses leading the exodus out of Egypt. Any Chinese can tell it: how the fledgling Communist Party and its Red Armies, some 200,000 strong, were driven out of their bases in the South in the early 1930s by the Nationalist government under Chiang Kaishek; how, pursued, blocked and harried by their enemies, they chose the only way out – to go where no one could follow, over mountains higher than birds could fly, across rivers where all the boats had been burnt, through swamps and grassland death traps; how Mao steered the course from victory to victory; how, after two years of incredible endurance, courage and hope against impossible odds – and a march of 8,000 miles – the Red Armies reached the barren Yellow Plateau of north-west China. Only a fifth of those who set out arrived – worn out, battered but defiant. In less than a decade, they had fought back, defeated Chiang Kaishek, and launched the New China in the heat of revolution. In Mao's own words:

Has history ever known a long march to equal ours? No, never. The Long March … has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes. The Long March has sown many seeds which will sprout, leaf, blossom and bear fruit, and will yield a harvest in the future. In a word, the Long March has ended with victory for us and defeat for the enemy.

The myth was born, and it remains the enduring emblem of China today. We can hardly escape it. The Long March was enshrined for the nation in the musical extravaganzas East Is Red and Ode to the Long March, and feature films of battles during the March became cinema classics. They took the idealism, optimism and heroism of the Long Marchers and imprinted them on our minds. The myth glowed ever brighter with the help of two major adulatory accounts, both, oddly, by Americans: Edgar Snow's Red Star over China, in 1936, and Harrison Salisbury's Long March: The Untold Stories, in 1985. With the imprimatur of the Chinese Communist Party, they made the myth close to impregnable.

‘If you find it hard, think of the Long March; if you feel tired, think of our revolutionary forebears.’ The message has been drilled into us that we can accomplish any goal set before us by the Party because nothing compares in difficulty with what they did. Decades after the historical one, we have been spurred on to ever more Long Marches – to industrialize China, to feed the largest population in the world, to catch up with the West, to reform the socialist economy, to send men into space, to engage with the 21st century.

Few have challenged or even modestly questioned the myth. It is just part of who we are. But the questions remain. Was Communism the magnet that drew the poor in droves to the Red Army? How did the Red Armies supply themselves with food, weapons and medicine? What happened to the four-fifths of the Marchers who did not reach the end – were they killed in battle, did they succumb to hunger and cold, did they desert, or did they fall victim to their own comrades? Was Mao the great strategist who never lost a battle? How were Mao and the Red Army finally saved? People have begun to ask such questions, but they are earthly matters. The Long March remains the sun in the sky.

Books about the March fill yards of shelves, but they rarely ask all these questions, or provide answers. In 2004, seventy years after it began, I set out over the same route, to discover as much as I could about the realities beyond the myth. There is not much documentation remaining – so many of the records were destroyed as the Armies fled. Quite a few generals have published their memoirs, but real scholarship is rare. Of the 40,000 original survivors, perhaps 500 are still alive, and they are now in their eighties and nineties. Most are just ordinary people who were left behind or managed to reach the end, but they have much to tell us.

I travelled mainly by train and bus. It is still a daunting journey, through areas little changed to this day – inaccessible, and desperately poor and undeveloped – but I saw enough to know that nothing can possibly compare with what the Marchers endured. My challenge was to find survivors and unlock their stories. I marched to the remote corners where they lived, sometimes 10–15 kilometres in a day, and up as high as 18,000 feet. The rough territory made me appreciate what the real Marchers went through, even though I was well fed and equipped, not worn down by a heavy pack, covering great distances day after day, month after month, on an empty stomach, ill-shod and poorly clothed, and ambushed and bombed, in between battles with more mobile and better-armed enemies.

I managed to find more than forty veterans, happily with their memories still fresh, and their spirits undiminished. Once I started talking to them, their stories poured out. Frequently, I would come back for a second or third day; they had so much to tell, and were so keen to tell it. I was intrigued, astonished, moved and inspired. They retain the idealism and optimism that first drove them, and also their doubts, uncertainties and fears. They touch the heart of the Long March: its bravery and sacrifice, its setbacks and suffering, and its self-inflicted wounds. Why so many supported the Communist cause also became very clear – as well as why many did not.

I record here the voices of these men and women. This is the Long March without the embroidery of adulation, and in all its humanity, as it was lived. It is not my story. It is theirs.

ONE Drain the Pond to Catch the Fish

I'm sending you to the Army my man,

You must see the reason why

The Revolution is for us.

I'm sending you to do or die.

Here's a towel I've embroidered

With all my love to say:

Revolution for ever!

The Party you must not betray!

THE SONG pierced the silence of Shi Village, which nestled at the foot of a hill covered in thick bamboo groves. It was mid-October, 1935, in Jiangxi Province, southern China. The autumn harvest was already in and the land surrounding the village was yellow with the stubble of rice stalks, but some fields stood as if wasted, with grass sprouting in the dried-out paddy, already turning brown. A few water buffalo were plodding home, only stopping when they came to their favourite place, the village pond, where they drank, ducks and geese swam, children bathed, women washed their clothes, and where men asked one another about their day. Nearby stood the giant camphor tree, whose overhanging branches gave ample shelter from the rain and intense heat of the South.

Today the water buffalo had the pond to themselves, and only the village ancestor shrine opposite showed signs of life, but not with pious prayers and hypnotic chants offered to the ancestors: only the revolutionary song calling on young men to join the Red Army. Through the imposing entrance topped by grey-tiled eaves, boys carrying spears rushed in and out, looking solemn, as if they had been entrusted with the most important task of their lives. Two young women were putting a table and some benches outside the gate. As the song died away, more women came out, clutching shoes they were making out of cloth, calling their children, while others gathered up firewood from outside the gate, and went home to cook.

‘Nobody is too tired to sing! Keep up the good work!’ called Wang Quanyuan, the young woman who had just emerged from a house nearby. She had on a grey cotton jacket, the kind every soldier wore, tied with a rope round her waist, but its simplicity made her beauty stand out even more. She asked one woman to bring more benches, and then stopped one of the boys who was running by, and whispered something in his ear; nodding eagerly, he took to his heels.

Wang noticed the slogans on the white wall of the shrine, written in black ink but slightly washed out by the summer rain. ‘Down with the Landlords and Evil Gentry!’ ‘Long Live the Communists!’ ‘Long Live the Soviet!’ ‘I mustn't forget to tell them to repaint the slogans’, she murmured to herself, remembering that until four years ago she had no idea what Soviet was. Someone had told her that it was a foreign shop, and others said he was the brother of a famous Communist labour organizer. A warlord definitely thought so: he had posted a notice throughout the villages, offering a reward for the capture, dead or alive, of Mr Soviet. In the local dialect, Soviet was pronounced Su-wei-ai, which meant ‘we’, so perhaps the Soviet was our government, she once thought. Now she was actually working for the youth and women's departments of the Soviet, a government of workers and peasants that had been set up by Mao and his Red Army in southern Jiangxi in 1931. Small as it was, with barely three million people in half a dozen counties, hemmed in on all sides by Chiang Kaishek's Nationalist troops, the Jiangxi Soviet had all the functions of a state. Wang was told that the Communist Party was working to turn the whole of China into a Soviet. That would be the day, Wang smiled, but then became very solemn. ‘Everything hangs on tonight,’ she muttered to herself.

As darkness fell, the bell hanging from the camphor tree rang out. Four giant bamboo torches lit up the pond and the gate of the shrine hall. Women, and a few men, old and young, gathered with several hundred people from nearby villages, summoned by Wang's Red Pioneers. She had also sent for half a dozen militia men from the county Party headquarters; when they finally arrived, Wang stood up and delivered her speech:

‘Sisters and brothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, the Red Army is at its most critical time now, with many wounded every day. But in a war, there is always winning and losing. If we stop fighting just because we have lost a few battles, our Revolution will never succeed and we will always be exploited by the rich. You are strong. Do you want to be trampled on for the rest of your lives? If not, join the Red Army now!’

There was no reply.

Wang nodded to the militia men who were standing close by, and continued: ‘Don't be afraid. We will win. Use your brain. This village has hundreds of poor people, and only one or two landlords. Aren't we more powerful than them? All we need to do is to unite, but there is a traitor who does not want this to happen. He seems to care about you, telling you to keep your men at home, but if we all stay at home, our enemy will come, taking our land and raping our women. Is that what you want?’

‘Of course not!’ shouted the militia men.

‘Then let's bring the traitor out.’ Wang waved her hand. Two militia men appeared from behind the shrine gate, each holding the arm of a man, followed by a third with a pistol in his hand. Silence fell and the villagers looked at each other speechless. The accused was none other than the Party Secretary of their district, Mr Liu. Suddenly, a Red Pioneer raised his arm, shouting, ‘Down with the traitor! Kill the traitor!’

‘Tell me, what do you want done with him?’ Wang asked several times.

‘Kill him,’ yelled a militia man.

‘Kill him now!’ A chorus of voices followed.

Two shots at point blank range and Liu fell to the ground. Wang announced grimly: ‘This will be the fate of anyone who dares to sabotage the Revolution.’

It was hard to believe, when I met Woman Wang, that she had ever done such things, or suffered more than I could bear to think about. She had started as the quintessential supporter of the Revolution. Poverty had made her family sell her into a marriage which she did not want; joining the Communists represented hope. Chosen as one of only thirty women to go with the 1st Army among 86,000 men, she survived and rose to head the Red Army's only women's regiment. A year later, she was captured, raped and given to a Nationalist officer as a concubine – a ‘crime’ for which she was denounced by the Party, remaining under a cloud for the next fifty years. Still, she remained loyal to the Party, which she regarded as dearer to her than her parents. I remember thinking to myself after reading her biography: if there was ever a true Communist faithful, it must be Wang.

What better way to start my journey than by talking to her? I set out in October 2004, exactly seventy years after the Chinese Communist Party and the 1st Army abandoned their base in Jiangxi and began their escape from the Nationalists – the Long March as it became known. From Beijing I took the train, eighteen hours due south, and then after two hours more by bus through green-clad mountains and hills I found myself in Taihe in southern Jiangxi. It was a big town, with a grand new avenue, beautifully surfaced and complete with modern lighting – not many buildings yet, but looking for 21st-century growth. I wondered if I would have trouble finding Wang – after all Taihe had a population of half a million people and all I had was her biography, which I had been re-reading on the train. I took a rickshaw from the longdistance bus stop and mentioned Wang's name hesitantly; I was relieved when the driver told me to take it easy. ‘What a woman! How many went on the Long March from Jiangxi? 80,000? I guess not many of them are left today. Three in this town, and forty in Jiangxi. If you come next year, they will probably all be gone.’ He took me down the big avenue and then into the old quarter. Dusty, narrow, busy and crowded, just like the photographs of provincial towns in the 1930s. I was dropped off next to a dumpling shop with a queue of hungry customers. Behind it was Wang's courtyard, shaded by a pomegranate tree with its dark red fruit just bursting open. Beneath it, there she sat, looking gentle, serene and elegant, belying her 91 years, and without a trace of the toughness of the Red Army commander.

She was not surprised to see me, a complete stranger, walking in off the street and wanting to find out about her past. My copy of her biography was a good enough introduction. She asked me to sit down and called, ‘Another visitor from Beijing!’ A middle-aged woman came out. From what I had read, I assumed she was her adopted daughter – Wang was unable to conceive after the Long March. ‘You shouldn't ask too many questions, she gets too excited. Last week we had a journalist from Beijing, and she talked so much, it made her ill. Anyway, it is all in there,’ she said, referring to the book on my lap. Wang cut her short. ‘They think talking is a waste of breath, but they don't understand. So many men and women died for the good life we live today and I want people to remember that.’ She sent her daughter back inside for another biography, written by a local Party historian. ‘You might not have come across it.’

The daughter came out with the book and a tray of sliced watermelon. ‘Eat now, read later. I will answer all your questions. It will take you a few days – you see, unfortunately, I have had such a long life.’ She took a mouthful of the melon, and smiled, as if it was the rarest fruit in the world and she was tasting it for the first time. Clearly she was keen to talk. She was quick and warm, and over the next three days she opened up like the pomegranates – I heard of the idealism, the hope, the suffering, the sacrifice, the harshness and the courage of her life, like those of so many others. But Wang also painted in some of the shadows of her history, things that were almost against her nature to reveal, and most certainly at odds with the glorious stories of the Long March that I had grown up with.

Wang was born in 1913 in Lufu Village, not far from where she lives now. They barely had enough rice for six months after the landlord took his exorbitant rent. From the age of 5, she roamed the mountains with her sister to collect wild plants to eat. By the time she was 11, her parents found her a husband, who offered to pay off the family debt of 200 kilos of rice. She was in the dark about the arrangement until the wedding day, when her mother dressed her in a bright red outfit, and put her on a palanquin sent by the groom. He was sixteen years older than Wang, slightly retarded, and with so many smallpox scars he was nicknamed Big Smallpox. The villagers said a flower had been planted on a cowpat. When Wang saw him, she fainted, but her mother said the rice was in the pot, and nothing could be done about it.

Her parents’ only request was that he would not consummate the marriage until Wang was 18. Meanwhile, she would work like a slave in his household. But he could not wait for seven years: he slept around and the wife of a blind fortune-teller bore him a son. Gossip spread around the village and Wang was so humiliated that she returned to her parents’ house, hoping they would pity her and annul the marriage. No, you must go back, her mother told her. ‘When you marry a chicken, live with a chicken; when you marry a dog, live with a dog.’ It was fate.

When the Red Army marched into her village in the spring of 1930, she learned it was not fate. ‘Why do the landlords have so much land, while you have none?’ a Red Army officer asked her and her family. ‘Why do they eat fat pork every day, while you don't see one drop of oil for a whole year? Why do they wear silk while you are in rags? It isn't fair! For every one of them, there are ten of us. If we unite, we are bound to win. What do you say? Join us! Join the Revolution!’ She signed up on the spot, and her family received land, salt, rice, ham and tools, all confiscated from the landlords.

She told everyone about the benefits of the Communist Revolution, citing herself and her family as examples. And she did so by using the most popular method in rural Jiangxi – folksongs. She set new words to the old tunes, not the usual love ballads but full of zeal for the Revolution. She was so good, she was given the nickname ‘Golden Throat’. This was one of her favourites:

If we save the mountain, we'll have wood.

If we save the river, we'll have fish to fry.

If we save the Revolution, we'll have our own land.

If we save the Soviet, red flags will fly.

In December 1933, Wang had some unexpected news. Her devotion and success in work with women and young people brought her to Ruijin, the Red capital, as the people's representative for the Second National Congress of the Soviet.

‘Have you visited Ruijin?’ Wang asked me expectantly. I said I was going to after seeing her.

‘You should have gone there first. It was the capital! An old lady like me can wait. You know, we had a saying at the time: up north it is Beijing; down south it is Ruijin.’

She did concede later, although very reluctantly, that Ruijin could not compare with Beijing. It was a typical southern town with good feng shui. The curving Mian River embraced it, and an undulating mountain range shielded it from the west, with a white pagoda overlooking it from the hill to the east. No bigger than an average county town, its four gates and four roads leading in from them crossed at the centre, and 7,000 people lived within its walls. Because Chiang had imposed an economic blockade with his Fifth Campaign, many shops had their shutters down. Local products such as bamboo, paper, nuts and dried vegetables from the mountains could not be shipped out; salt, oil, petrol, cloth and other daily necessities could not come in. Those who broke the embargo were liable to punishment or even execution. The Nationalists reinforced the blockade with a Special Movement Corps, whose members had every incentive to catch the offenders – they were rewarded with 50% of whatever they confiscated.

Wherever there were profits, there were smugglers: salt, medicine, gunpowder and other much-needed items were transported, hidden in coffins, at the bottom of manure baskets and inside bamboo poles. They even managed to bring in an X-ray machine in a coffin, with three dozen men and women pretending to be grieving relatives, crying their eyes out. The warlord of Guangdong also defied the blockade by secretly buying tungsten that was found in abundance within the Soviet. But it was like throwing a cup of water onto flaming firewood. Ruijin was feeling the pinch. Salt was the scarcest commodity; Wang did not taste salt for months, and out of sheer desperation she and her friends scraped the white deposits from the walls of toilets, and even from graveyards, and boiled them down.

Even today she craved salt. ‘I think I'm making up for the shortage all those years ago. You don't know what it's like, as if your body were made of cotton, or you were walking on clouds. I often fell.’ I knew how deprived she felt when she invited me to join her, her daughter, and her two grandchildren for lunch. Had she not explained, I would have thought the daughter had emptied the salt pot when she was cooking. The chicken, the bean curd, the beans and the soup were all so salty that I could barely eat them. I must have drunk a gallon of tea to wash the meal down.

All the hardship of daily life in Ruijin was forgotten when Wang attended the Congress on 22 January 1934. The Hall of Workers and Peasants, specially built for the occasion, took her breath away. She had never seen anything like it. It was not like a Buddhist temple; it was not like the mansions of rich people; it was not like shrine halls, which were normally the most impressive buildings in southern towns and villages. It was very grand, an octagon, the shape of a Red Army cap. Above the imposing main entrance was a big red star with a hammer and sickle on it, the emblem of the Red Army. The impressive scale of the interior matched that of the exterior: it was massive, with two storeys, and it could hold over 2,000 people. She could not understand how they had built it, with a roof but no central pillar. And it was lit by these strange lamps that did not need oil. All it took was for someone to pull down a black handle on the wall, and the hall was flooded with brilliant light.

Wang and the 776 delegates stood inside the hall, listening as a band played a rousing song, the Internationale. A tall, lean man with big eyes came onto the platform, and stood in front of the Communist red flag. The woman next to her whispered that this was Comrade Mao, the man who set up the Soviet. She had hardly registered the fact before Mao said, in his thick Hunan accent: ‘Comrades, on behalf of the Central Executive Committee, I declare the Second National Congress of the Soviet open. On behalf of the Central Executive Committee I give the whole body of delegates the Revolutionary salute!’ There was thunderous applause from all, and Wang clapped so hard, her hands hurt.

Mao, founder of the Jiangxi Soviet Government, Zhu De, the Commander of the Red Army, and other senior Party leaders all spoke during the Congress. What they said was mostly beyond her – for example, she did not know where Tibet was and why Mao mentioned it in his report on the Soviet Government. But she was really fired up by Mao's conclusion:

Our Congress is the supreme organ of state power of the whole country … Our Congress will make the Fifth Campaign end in utter rout, develop the Revolution in the whole of China, extend the territory of the Soviet to all regions ruled by Chiang Kaishek's government, and unfurl the red flag throughout the country. Let us shout: Long live the Second National Soviet Congress! Long live the Soviet New China!

She could not get over this somersault in her life. It was like heaven and earth swapping places. One moment she was a poor country girl; the next she was a member of the supreme body which governed the Soviet. A folksong came to her mind, down to earth but true to her feelings:

Light from lamps is no light

Compared with the brightness of the sun;

Fathers and mothers are dear

But the Communist Party is dearer.

The most important day in Wang's life was 17 April 1934. With her right arm raised before the red flag, she made this solemn pledge to the Communist Party: ‘I will sacrifice myself; I will keep my promises; I will struggle against our enemies; I will fight for the Revolution; I will obey orders, and never betray the Party.’ She knew she would honour this pledge. She was even willing to die; without the Party, her life would not have been worth living. Mao's words on the Red Army Martyrs’ Monument in Ruijin, built in 1932, were engraved on her heart:

In the great fight against imperialism and for land reform, many comrades have gloriously sacrificed themselves. Their sacrifices demonstrate the invincible courage of the proletariat and lay the foundation for the Chinese Soviet Republic. The worker-peasant toiling masses of all China are advancing, marching on the blood these comrades shed, to overthrow the rule of imperialism and Chiang Kaishek's reactionary government and win victory for the Soviet over the whole of China.

Wang was sent to the Party school, where they groomed future leaders, but she had hardly settled in there before she was called to the most urgent task of the moment: the recruitment drive. For the past four years since October 1930, Chiang Kaishek had launched five successive campaigns against the Communist base in Jiangxi. He started with 100,000 men for the First Campaign, thinking he would have no difficulty getting rid of a mere 9,000 Communist guerrillas supported by fewer than two million people, in an area of just 200 square kilometres. He likened the Communists, or the Red Bandits as he called them, to a locust trying to block the way of a cart – they were day–dreaming. But the Red Bandits gave him a taste of their ferocity and skilled guerrilla tactics – 15,000 of his troops were captured in two months.

Exasperated, Chiang threw in more men and arms, and himself flew to Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi. He appointed himself Commander–in–Chief, but only to suffer more humiliating and crushing defeats – he lost nearly 50,000 men to the Red Army in 1931 alone, and another 30,000 in early 1933. After this, he vowed to wipe the Red Bandits out once and for all – they were obviously more than just a nuisance. In July 1933, Chiang began his fifth, and biggest campaign: 500,000 men descended on the Jiangxi Soviet from three directions, equipped with the latest weapons from Germany, Britain and America, and supported by 200 planes with 150 American and Canadian pilots.

Ten months into the Fifth Campaign, the Red Army lost over 50,000 men. On 20 May 1934 the Central Committee of the Party called for more soldiers for the front:

The decisive battles in the coming months will decide whether we live or die. These will be the last and most crucial moments for us to wipe out and kill the enemy. This is total war. Every member of the Communist Party, every worker, and every member of the toiling masses should prepare to shed his last drop of blood at the front.¹

The Party called for 50,000 recruits within three months. However, this was not enough, and September saw another urgent campaign with a target of 30,000, with each village, district and county given fixed quotas. Wang was told to go to Gangxi County which had repeatedly failed to reach its target.

Why was she given a hard case like Gangxi? I asked.

‘To test me. To try me. To encourage me. As we say, good iron should be used for the blade.’ I wanted to tell her that the Party chose the right person.

She walked from village to village, accompanied by Liu, the Party secretary of the district, whom she had been assigned to help. What she saw shocked her. The villages were almost haunted, with little sign of life and very few young men around; some were simply abandoned, with the peasants having fled to the areas controlled by Chiang's government. When she went up to an old man in the field for a chat, he yelled at her: ‘You are draining the pond to catch the fish. But you don't understand, there are no fish left in the pond!’ Liu took her aside, explaining that two of his sons had joined the Red Army five years ago and he had not heard from them since. Everyone was doing their best like the old man, Liu promised. The district had about 1,300 men between the ages of 16 and 45, and over 1,000 were either in the army or working for it as porters and labourers; the rest were sick, or they were from landlord and rich peasant families and so could not be trusted to fight for the poor. He did not see how his district could come up with another forty–five men this time. But he would try his hardest.

The deadline came on 27 September, and out of a quota of 4,000 for Gangxi, barely 700 had signed up; Liu's district only came up with twelve. On 28 September she received an urgent message from the Women and Youth Departments in Ruijin. The deadline was extended to 5 October: ‘This is the last deadline and must not be one minute late or a single recruit short.’

I asked what would have happened if she failed to meet the target? Would she lose face, or worse, her job?

She turned around and looked at me, surprised and almost annoyed by the questions.

‘Lose face? You have no idea. People could lose their lives.’ One of her friends had a quota of fifteen in a previous recruitment drive, but she only managed twelve. She was put in prison for sabotaging the Revolution. Her family all thought she was going to be executed: they even prepared her funeral clothes. But she was released after fifteen days, on condition that she would make up for her crime by meeting a double quota next time.

Did she not think the punishment was a bit extreme? The poor woman must have tried.

‘Trying was not enough. You had to succeed,’ Wang quickly corrected me. ‘You know what the Party said: “Failure in enlisting equals helping the enemy!” I did not get it at first, but later I understood. If the Red Army had more soldiers, we would have been able to hold on to the base.’

In their drive to reach the targets, local officials often resorted to extreme measures. Shengli County insisted that all Party officials join up. Overnight many fled to the mountains – some even committed suicide – and there was absolute chaos. In the worst areas of Ruijin, those who refused to join the army were locked in dark rooms with their hands tied behind their backs. And no food was served to them – the soldiers at the front were more deserving. Wang's department received any number of letters from the village women's associations, complaining about the rough way their men had been treated. One letter read: ‘The Party secretary said there was a meeting in the village hall to discuss land issues. Many people turned up. Suddenly two men locked the door. “Sign up for the Red Army, or no one can leave.” It was not until the early hours when some finally agreed, and they were taken off straight away.’ What shocked Wang even more was that some women activists promised sex to any man who would join. They did fill their quotas quickly, but she wondered how long the men would stay in the army.

I had always thought the peasants competed to join the Red Army – after all, it was to defend their land, their homes and their children. Our literature, art, films and school textbooks are full of stories and images of parents signing up their sons, wives persuading their husbands to fight, sisters making uniforms for their brothers, and young women seeing off their lovers to the front. I particularly remembered one metaphor: the Red Army was the fish and the peasants the water. The fish would be dead out of water, and the water would be poorer without the fish. The support of the peasants was the secret weapon of Communist success. As for forced conscription, I had always been told that only Chiang's army used it.

Wang laughed when I told her that. She held out her hands and said: ‘People are different, just like my ten fingers. Many had suffered like me, and they begged to join the Revolution. Recruitment was not difficult at all in the early campaigns. But as the war continued, it got harder and harder. There were not enough men around. Also people thought we were losing so they did not want to die for nothing. That was why we had to work on them.’

Wang was right. After five campaigns by Chiang's troops in five years, both the population and the area in the Jiangxi base had been reduced so drastically that a Red Army officer said it was no wider than an arrow's flight. In one year more than 160,000 men had been drafted into the Red Army just to break the Fifth Campaign. In fact, almost all the able–bodied men had already been enlisted. Mao did his own investigation in Changgang District in late 1933. Out of 407 men between the ages of 16 and 45, 79% were in the Red Army, very much as Party Secretary Liu reported for his district.² Perhaps the old man in Gangxi County was right: the Party was draining the pond to catch the fish.

‘We had to defend the base at all costs. The survival of the Party required it.’ Wang was adamant.

She had been ordered to deliver her quota of forty–five men in October 1934. For the first time in her life, she was having sleepless nights. But Wang quoted another saying. ‘A man should not be made desperate by his pee.’ She had an idea.

She put on her jacket and went outside. It was drizzling, dark and silent, with not even a dog barking: they had all been killed to stop them giving away the Army's movements. She tiptoed from house to house, alert for the sound of conversation. Suddenly she heard the voice of an old lady:

‘Aya, such a dreadful day! How are the three coping on the mountain? Perhaps you should take them their bamboo hats.’

‘What's the point? They must be soaked by now,’ replied a woman, perhaps her daughter–in-law.

Wang listened for a while, and then crept quietly to another window.

‘Party Secretary Liu is two-faced. In front of comrade Wang, he is all enthusiasm; behind her back, he badmouths the Red Army. What is he playing at?’ asked a young girl.

‘Stupid girl! Secretary Liu is thinking of us. The Red Army has been losing for the last six months. So many are being killed every day. If your brother hadn't deserted and gone into hiding, he would have been cannon fodder by now,’ grumbled a man, who seemed to be the father.

Now she understood what was going on. So there were still fish in the pond, and birds in the mountains. If she could persuade them to come out of hiding, she would not only meet her quota, but also send much-needed men to the front. But what was she going to do with Liu? She thought about it and decided to send a messenger immediately to the county Party headquarters. Then she launched her plan of action.

At the crack of dawn, Wang dispatched a dozen Red Pioneers to the nearby villages, requesting everyone to come to an urgent meeting that evening in Shi Village. Then she went to the house with the three deserters. The old lady and her daughter-in-law looked as if they had had a bad night. Wang inquired about the men in the family and the older woman said that her son was away as a porter for the Red Army, and her two grandsons were fighting at the front. ‘We all do our bit,’ she added, poker-faced.

‘By hiding in the mountains, granny?’ Wang asked.

The old lady lost her nerve, and blurted out: ‘Yes, you give us land, but with no men in the house, what can we do with it?’ She shrieked, pointing to her bound feet and her daughter-in-law's: ‘Thunder will strike women who work in the paddy. When your people called on our sons and husbands to join, they promised to send men to help on the land. Some turned up at the beginning, but they were more trouble than they were worth – you had to feed them and look after them. And soon nobody bothered to come. We haven't got much of a harvest this year. We complained to secretary Liu. He said we should go and loot, or get our men back.’

Wang might have sympathized if she had not pointed to their bound feet. That made her angry. Under the Communists, women could not get married unless they unbound their feet first, yet these women refused to free themselves. She and some other activists once attempted to straighten women's feet by force, but they soon went back to their old ways. In her eyes, they were like parasites, sitting at home waiting for their husbands to work the fields. They only had themselves to blame.

It baffled her how women could fail to support the Revolution. They benefited most – unbound feet, abolition of arranged marriages, violence towards women outlawed, and more roles for them in general. Their very happiness depended on the survival of the Soviet. When the New Marriage Law came out, tens of thousands of women immediately asked for a divorce, remarried and then divorced again. The local officials were so swamped by the paper work, the Party had to pass a decree forbidding men and women from marrying more than three times, and they must live together for at least two months before they could register for divorce.

What surprised me was that Wang did not walk out of her own arranged marriage, as she had persuaded many other women to do. On the contrary, she promised her husband that she would fulfil her wifely duty if he signed up for the Red Army. He did so the very next day, and his happiness was doubled when he was allowed into her bed without having to wait for another two years and honour her mother's request. Why was that?

‘Why not? The Red Army needed all the manpower it could get,’ she said in all seriousness.

‘But you weren't happy with him,’ I said.

‘What's happiness got to do with it? When so many people were suffering, how could you be happy? I couldn't,’ she reminded me, before she went inside to make more tea – her daughter had gone to the market to get things for supper.

A thought did occur to me, fleetingly: did Wang sign her husband up because she knew that would be the surest way of getting rid of him? As we say, bullets are blind. I was wrong. When she returned with the tea and biscuits, Wang said that her husband died from tuberculosis while she was busy recruiting in Gangxi County. He was desperate to prove he was worthy of her affection, and he exerted himself as a scout for the Red Army. His last words were: ‘Without seeing her, I cannot even close my eyes in death.’

I was ashamed I had even contemplated such a thought. It would have been to misjudge Wang entirely. I could not think myself into the degree of dedication she had attained. For her, and many of her generation, personal happiness and physical desire did not count – they were submerged in the excitement she felt for the Revolution. Yes, she had another recruit, and would be praised for it. But her innermost feeling was devotion – to the people and ideals that promised to lift China out of the oppression she saw all around her, and had been subjected to herself. I remembered the slogans and exhortations that filled our school books: ‘Communism is higher than the sky. Sacrifice everything for it.’ For me, they were just slogans; for Wang, it was faith.

My respect for Wang increased later when I pieced together how much she was up against, from memoirs, interviews and government archives of the 1930s – when the Communist Party was still quite open about its strengths and weaknesses. At the time, it was not unusual for women to threaten their husbands with divorce if they signed up for the Red Army. Others went a step further. Ruijin had a hospital for disabled soldiers and it became a favourite haunt for women looking for husbands. Their reasoning was simple: at least their husbands would stay at home. If all else failed, and their husbands were called to the front, they would sleep with any available man. Local women's associations constantly reported to the centre about the problem of ‘women stealing men’. One of the reports read:

Many wives of the soldiers haven't heard from their men since they joined Mao's and Zhu's Army six years ago. Quite a few have asked for divorce, and if we do not grant it, they will make huge scenes and call us all sorts of names. Or they simply go ahead and sleep with other men and have illegitimate children. What is the most appropriate way to solve this problem?³

Wang would have preferred harsh measures – otherwise men would all want to stay at home. Much to her disappointment, the Party amended the Marriage Law: women could ask for a divorce if they did not hear from their husbands for three years, instead of six; and the children they bore in the meantime would be recognized as legitimate ‘because they are the masters of our new society’.

But in the recruitment drive in Shi Village, Wang decided to be tough. She told the old lady and her daughter-in-law to bring in their men from their hiding-places in the mountains – or else they would regret it. She left them in no doubt what the punishments were. ‘We will publicly shame you at the rally tonight. Then we will put posters on your doors, windows and gates, denouncing you as traitors and deserters. All the benefits you have received, food, blankets, clothes and oil, will be returned to the government. And your men will be forced to work on the Red Army soldiers’ land, or be sentenced to a year's hard labour. Please think carefully.’

The grandmother sat in the front row at that night's execution. After Party secretary Liu was shot in the head, the blood trickled towards her feet across the floor. Her legs were shaking like paddy husks, but she struggled to stand up and offered her two grandsons. Many followed, including two women who signed themselves up. Wang had more recruits than her quota. For the first time in many months, a genuine smile lit up her face.

I thought I recognized that smile when Wang recounted the final moment of the story, as if she was back in front of the crowds, encouraging, agitating and judging. There was no pity, no regret and no apology. The confidence that the truth was with her was unshakeable. The Revolution was supposed to be for the masses and they were treated like an inexhaustible mine from which the Party could dig everything they needed. It did not occur to them that the peasants could not bear any more burdens. If their support was crucial for the Revolution, as they were told all the time, perhaps their reluctance and even refusal was part of the reason why the Party and the Red Army had to abandon their base in Jiangxi and begin the Long March, to search for a new one. I doubted Wang ever thought this way. She simply did what the Party told her, and did it very well. As it was, she hardly had time to enjoy her success and report it to the Party, when an urgent message came from Ruijin on the evening of 15 October: ‘Important event. Return at once.’

She set off immediately with the messenger. It was good the moon was almost full, guiding her every step of the way, while she grappled with the mystery of why she had been called back so suddenly. Could it be her delay in meeting the deadline? She had not heard from her boss – it was as if she had been forgotten. She feared she might be thrown in prison, like her friend, or worse, executed.

‘If I had to die, better to die in battle, taking a few enemies with me. That would have been worth it.’ Now her mind was all on battles. Suddenly the thought came to her: was a big battle coming? From the early summer, apart from recruitment, she had taken part in another government campaign to borrow or appropriate grain from the peasants. The target was one million dan of rice – almost the entire autumn harvest in the Soviet. They got there in three months, using much the same methods as the recruitment drive.

At the same time, there was a call for funds: 800,000 silver dollars were issued as government bonds. Everyone must buy them, or donate money. She thought the women's department was very ingenious in asking women to donate their silver jewellery. Perhaps they were inspired by Mao, who noticed this custom in southern Jiangxi. ‘Every woman has silver hairpins and earrings, no matter how poor they are, and bracelets and rings, if they are not starving.’ Women's associations at every level organized task forces and propaganda teams to shame those ‘who are still wearing the symbols of feudalism and bourgeois decadence’. In the end, they collected 220,000 ounces of silver.⁴

And then, just before she was dispatched to Gangxi County, a memo went out to all counties for 200,000 pairs of extra thick straw sandals and 100,000 rice pouches, to be delivered to the Red Army before 10 October. To her amazement, there was not much resistance; perhaps the peasants would do anything rather than enlist. Some women had written rhymes on pieces of paper and put them inside the sandals; one of them read: ‘With this pair of sandals, you will travel 10,000 li. No matter how high the mountains, and how deep the rivers, you will never stop on the road to revolution.’

Perhaps a big battle was coming. Otherwise, why did the Red Army need so many soldiers, so many pairs of shoes, and so much money and grain, and all for October? ‘That is it,’ she clapped her hands, giving the messenger a fright. ‘As Father would say, “The fish will either be caught in the net or they'll break it and sink the boat.” ’

It was early morning, 16 October, when she arrived back in Ruijin. She went straight to see Liu Ying, the Head of the Youth Department, who had sent for her. ‘You were quick. I didn't think you'd be back tonight,’ Liu said, handing her a towel to wipe the sweat off her face. The sisterly concern in Liu's voice assured her that her worst fears were unfounded. All the same, she offered her apologies for missing the deadline. ‘Don't worry, we're in the same boat.’ Liu patted her on the head. She did not fill her own quota. She was summoned back three days ago to choose six staff to go on a major operation. ‘So, there is a big operation,’ Wang cried out with joy. ‘Whether you can take part or not all depends on the check-up tomorrow morning. Report to the General Hospital at nine o'clock.’

She was in for a shock when she reached the hospital. People were running about, dismantling and packing up heavy medical equipment, or loading medicine into panniers on their shoulders. The wounded were groaning on their beds with no one to see to them, or being carted off on stretchers or helped to hobble away. ‘Why are we breaking the place up?’ she wondered. Wang, and the other 100 girls waiting for their check-up, only added to the chaos by chattering nervously and giggling, like a flock of sparrows that could not stop chirping.

The doctors drew blood with a needle, listened to her chest down a tube with a cold metal disc at the end, hit her knees with a wooden hammer, and then asked her to lift a 20-kilo sack over her head. All the time, her heart was beating so fast she thought she might be ill, though she had never been sick in her life. What really scared her was the big machine which they said could see her insides. Its Chinese name was pronounced Ai-ke-si, which meant ‘If you go near it, you die.’ It was a great relief to come out in one piece, and be told that she was strong as a horse, and they would take her. She should go and get her provisions now and then report to the Cadres’ Battalion of the General Health Department of the Central Column in the afternoon. What was the Central Column? She had no idea, but she knew where to go.

She must have been overjoyed to be one of only fifteen girls chosen out of the 100 at the hospital, and of thousands more who never got that far.

‘Why so few women? Why me? I have asked that question millions of times,’ Wang said. I waited for her to answer herself.

‘Perhaps they thought we would be a burden. But I was healthy and strong,’ she finally said, though still uncertainly. The truth may be different. All the top leaders of the Party and the Army had their wives with them on the Long March. They wanted an equal number of other women to come along. Wang was a Party member; she had always delivered whatever was expected of her, and more; and she was known for firing two pistols simultaneously, hitting the bull's-eye with both. What she did not know at the time was that the Red Army was about to abandon Jiangxi and set up a new base elsewhere.

At 5 o'clock sharp on the afternoon of 16 October, the bugle sounded, as the sky turned pink in the setting sun. Wang marched out of Ruijin with the General Health Unit. Now it was clear: the Central Column was essentially the government on the move, more than 10,000 people, including many Party officials from all levels of the Jiangxi Soviet administration. She wore the dark blue jacket she had received that day, with matching trousers tucked inside her socks, and a pair of new sandals. The pack on her back held a light quilt, one more pair of sandals, seven kilos of grain, and an enamel washbasin dangling on a strap. A hat made of double-layered bamboo covered the pack and would be useful in the autumn rain. Now she felt like a real soldier, ready for battle, except that she had no rifle; but there were six stretchers in her care – the 1st Army insisted that all injured officers above brigadier level be taken on the March. She had seen many battles, but this was something different. Taking the wounded to the front? She knew not to ask too many questions.

TWO Turtle-shell Power

SOLDIER HUANG was adding frantically to the defences of his foxhole – putting stones on the two layers of logs, and more pine branches on the stones. Everything was wet, the trees were dripping, and the mud stuck to his shoes. As he looked out nervously, he could see one of the Nationalist blockhouses, or ‘turtle-shells’ as they called them, 600 metres away. It was a solid brick building like a round granary with gun slits, stronger-looking than anything he had seen in the villages. They had been preparing themselves for a week and he wondered when the fighting would start. But he did not want to dwell on it, so he tried humming one of the songs he had learned in the last few days:

Comrades! Ready with your guns!

Charge with one heart,

Struggle and fight to kill!

Comrades! Fight for freedom!

Fight for the Soviets!

He struggled to remember the next line. A faint light on the horizon was visible through the rain, which had been falling steadily ever since they had reached the front. As dawn broke, he could hear birds singing. Suddenly, they went quiet and a heavy growling noise took over. He leapt into his foxhole. A few seconds later the sky was black with planes, like huge flocks of crows, and the crump of bombing began. The din became deafening. One bomb dropped close by and his foxhole collapsed, leaving just his head free. He dug himself out, and glanced round: two-thirds of the foxholes his company had built were flattened, and the trench was destroyed.

The captain ordered the men to take position. Huang put his rifle down and lay next to it in the wet soil of what was left of the trench. Looking to left and right, he could see quite a few men missing – the bombing had taken its toll. And then the artillery began. The ground shook and flowers of earth blossomed and fell on him, almost burying him. Within ten minutes a quarter of the company was dead or wounded.

When the shelling stopped, Soldier Huang was still kneeling on the sodden ground. A man rushed to pull him up, shouting that the infantry would soon advance on them. He only had five bullets. The captain shouted, ‘Don't fire until they are three metres away.’ Huang could see their white cap badges and the sun flashing on their weapons. They fired and he missed his target. A few fell, but within seconds the enemy was on them.

It was bayonet to bayonet, kill or be killed. He accounted for two of them. He was barely thinking, too numb even to feel fear, and screaming like a madman to release the panic bottled up in his chest. Before long, the Nationalists retreated, and the captain ordered his men to do likewise. As they staggered away, their feet fighting with the clay earth, the shelling began again. This was the daily pattern.

At dusk, everything fell quiet. There were piles of bodies within 70 metres of their trench, enough to form a human barricade. He shuddered to see an officer walking around, finishing off those who were still groaning from their wounds. He was told it was to stop them from surrendering and giving information to the enemy. Once they had buried the dead, they gathered around the mess-tent. He had little appetite although he had eaten nothing the whole day. The cook had prepared food for over 100 but there were only thirty left in his company. After the meal, they retreated five kilometres in the dark, to dig another trench. This was Soldier Huang's first battle and he was only 14. The Guangchang battle in April 1934 lasted eighteen days and the Red Army lost 6,000 men, with 20,000 wounded. It was the heaviest blow the Red Army had suffered up till then, and it was the turning point in Chiang's campaign.

I found Huang through the pensioners' office of the Ruijin county government, which, in the Communist tradition, had excellent records of the Long March survivors and anyone they wanted to keep tabs on. ‘I'm not sure how much he can tell you,’ the clerk said slowly after he had finished the newspaper he was reading. ‘He is only a peasant. You should really talk to old Wu. He used to be the Prime Minister's bodyguard. He knows things, but he is in hospital. Last year we still had a dozen. Now there are only eight left.’ Two lived in the mountains with the nearest road five miles away, three were in hospital, and one was away visiting relatives. ‘Why don't you start with old Huang? If he is no use, come back to me.’

I should have felt discouraged but I did not. I knew what he thought: it was only worth talking to the heroes and the big decision-makers; but their stories are already in our history books, told and retold until they have become symbols, the eternal refrain. Perhaps for him, Huang was not enough of a committed revolutionary, but his ordinary life as a foot soldier on the March was just what I was missing. With luck it would tell me the unadorned truth about what the rank and file really experienced.

I took a rickshaw – there were no taxis – and set off for Huang's village on the outskirts of Ruijin. We went past the farmers’ market, through the houses of the old quarter with their tiled roofs and curling eaves, and over the sandstone bridge across the Mian River, swathed in mist. There was a grace and tranquillity to the scene. Suddenly we turned a corner and the illusion was dispelled – we were in a huge square of incongruous pink concrete houses and shops, with a fountain in the middle – a giant steel ball on a tower. The rickshaw driver turned proudly towards me, ‘This is our new town centre. Our Party secretary got a promotion for building it.’

I was relieved to leave the theme-park square behind and go back to the green countryside with its endless paddy-fields. It was next to one of them that I found Huang's village. All its 1,000 people shared the name of Huang, and the clan's ancestor shrine stood prominently in the middle. I was directed to find him there, listening with a huge crowd, not to the village head relaying the latest Party instructions, but to an eager salesman preaching the benefits of Heart K, which was supposed to give you more blood. Huang was a convert, taking two ampoules every day. ‘I want to live as long as possible,’ he told me, waving the small box of magic potions he had just bought. He did not look as though he needed them. He was short, hard and lean, with a piercing gaze. He walked upright, faster than I could easily follow. On the way to his house, he introduced me to his cousins, nieces, nephews, grand-nephews, great-grand-nieces, three brothers and two sisters-in-law. It was still a closely knit clan.

Huang's house was in the middle of an open courtyard, with his eldest son occupying the house in the front, his youngest brother at the back, and his two nephews from his third brother on the left and right. The house was bare apart from a bed with a mosquito net, a table with a small black-and-white TV, a few benches, and the stove. He had few visitors and spent his day listening to local operas. ‘I can't see properly because of the snow-blindness I suffered on the Long March,’ he explained as he turned on the set. ‘Her voice is so sweet. But is the actress as ugly as my wife said?’ he asked, with a mischievous smile. His wife was right: she was so ugly I was glad he could not see her properly.

‘I'll keep the treat to myself then,’ Huang said with a good laugh, and switched off the TV. He suggested we sit outside instead to enjoy the autumn sun. He handed me a stool, and a sweet, while popping one in his toothless mouth. ‘I cannot complain, really. This is a good life,’ he said, sucking on the sweet noisily. Looking at Huang, I thought of the Chinese saying: ‘A wife, children, a patch of land and a warm bed make a happy peasant.’ Huang seemed to be its living proof, but the pensioners’ office had told me he joined the Red Army when he was only 14. He must have been very enthusiastic.

‘They kidnapped me,’ he said, raising his voice.

‘Kidnapped?’ It was the first time I had heard the word in this connection.

‘Thunder will strike me if I tell you one false word,’ Huang said. ‘At first they only wanted the strong and handsome ones. The Red Army deserved the best. Then they took the old, the sick, and even a couple of opium addicts. And then it was children. The Party secretary in our village forced everyone with a dick to sign up, whether they were 15 or 50. The Nationalists did not force children to join, but the Red Army did.’ Huang shook his head.

He was the oldest of five boys and two girls. He was 14 in 1934, three years short of the minimum age for enlisting. A woman activist visited his family every day, working on her mother. ‘My boys still wet their beds, and they're shorter than a rifle. How can they fight a war?’ his mother pleaded. ‘Oh, my sister, don't worry. They can be orderlies, or learn the bugle. There are plenty of things to do in the army. They get fed, and clothed too. It takes the burden off you.’

His mother was not convinced – so many men had gone to the front and never come back. And as the Chinese say, a good man is not destined for the army, just like good iron is not for nails. She sent Huang to hide in the mountains with his uncle and twenty other men from the village, but three days later she called him back. The village had a quota of 300 recruits, and the Party secretary would be thrown in jail if he could not meet his target. He had arrested Huang's father and would not release him until either he signed up, or one of his sons did. After a sleepless night, Huang's mother decided to opt for her eldest son – the family had so many mouths to feed and could not do without the father. She packed his favourite rice cakes with ham and a padded jacket that belonged to his father. ‘Take good care of yourself. Quick like a rat and alert like a fox,’ were her last words to Huang.

He had only a week's training, on a winnowing ground. He practised shooting with a stick – every single rifle was needed for the front. Holding the wooden stick, the instructor told them to aim a bit above the target, and he could not understand why. ‘Think of your pee. It's the same idea.’ He got it, but still wasted three of his five precious bullets in the first battle. And he nearly killed himself when he pulled the pin out of his grenade, and stood there watching it fizz as if it were a firecracker. Luckily, the man standing next to him saw it, grabbed it from his hand and threw it out of the trench. It exploded seconds later.

Huang was lucky to survive his first battle. The lack of training accounted for up to 50% of the casualties suffered by the Red Army. The problem was so serious that Liu Buocheng, the Chief of Staff of the Red Army and the Commandant of its academy, felt compelled to address it in a series of articles in Revolution and War. An orderly was sent from his academy to execute a prisoner, but he misfired and shot himself. ‘As a veteran soldier, he was unable to fire accurately at a tied-up enemy! … In battle the White soldiers suffer fewer casualties than the Red Army. Why? Maybe we have braved more enemy fire, but we are also to blame: many of our soldiers do not know how to shoot accurately or use a bayonet.’¹

If he had to fight, Huang wished he had more bullets. It would give him a better chance of coming through. He had only five for each assault, with three grenades. The bullets were produced in the Red Army's own workshop in a disused temple. Local craftsmen and a few engineers captured from the Nationalists recycled used shells or melted down old copper coins and wire, moulded them into shape, filed them down by hand, and then filled the cartridge with home-made explosives. Huang had trouble loading them into his rifle; when he managed to pull the trigger, it took a minute for them to explode, and even then they did not go far. Often they just tumbled out of the barrel and landed at his feet. Liu Shaoqi, the Commissar of the 3rd Corps and later President of China, called on the arsenal to do a better job. ‘The bullets were so useless. Over 30,000 of them were duds. The rifles were repaired but they went wrong again after firing a single shot.’²

Huang could also have done with a better rifle, although he knew many soldiers did not even have one or, worse, a whole platoon shared one. His was a locally made hunting gun, quite temperamental. The trigger got stuck so often that he used the bayonet more. Still, it was dearer than his life, at least in the eyes of his captain. One night they were retreating in a downpour. He slipped and fell into a puddle. Hearing the splash, the captain immediately asked, ‘Is your rifle OK?’ Huang felt really angry. Was the rifle more important than his life? He wanted to smash it, but he knew he would be court-martialled if he did.

He kept asking his captain when he could get a proper rifle. ‘Next time we have a victory,’ he said, ‘you grab whatever you like. That is how we always did it before. You know what we call Chiang Kaishek? Our head of supply.’ The captain began to reminisce about the old days. He remembered what Mao had said right before Chiang's First Campaign: ‘Comrades! With enemy guns we will arm ourselves. With captured enemy artillery we will defend the Soviets! We will destroy them with their own weapons, and if they will only keep up the war against us long enough, we will build up an army of a million workers and peasants! We will strip them of their last rifle, their last bullet.’³

The Red Army lured Chiang's troops deep into their base, where the villagers had been evacuated with all their belongings. ‘We needed porters, but none was available; we searched for guides, but none could be found; we sent our own scouts, but they could collect no information. We were groping in the dark.’⁴ Such was the despair of one Nationalist general in the campaign. Chiang's front-line commander, General Zhang Huizang, was keen to prove himself and pushed the furthest, cutting himself off from the flank divisions. He was ambushed by the Red Army on New Year's Eve; he and 15,000 of his men were captured, and the spoils were enormous: 12,000 rifles, light and heavy machine guns, trench mortars, field telephones, a radio set with its operators, and sacks of rice, flour, ham and bacon, as well as the funds Zhang carried for the entire campaign. There was enough medicine for the Red Army hospital for months. The spoils were carried back to the Red Army bases by horses and seven camels, also taken from the Nationalists. Three weeks later Chiang called off the First Campaign.

The Red Army continued to supply itself with the most up-to-date weapons from Chiang's defeats – 20,000 rifles in the Second Campaign; and more equipment of every kind in the Third and Fourth. In 1933 and 1934 alone, Chiang spent nearly 60 million silver dollars importing state-of-the-art rifles, artillery and planes from America and Europe, but most of these ended up in the hands of the Communists.

All the stories of success in previous campaigns were beginning to trouble Huang, as they had been stuck in trenches for weeks, with bombs falling, shells whistling overhead and bodies piling up. He wondered whether the captain made them up to get rid of the gloom, or they were fighting a new enemy altogether. The Nationalists were just like turtles: they put their heads out of their blockhouses to see if they were safe; as soon as they sensed danger, they retreated. Even when they were under attack, they stayed put and waited for reinforcements.

The captain said these were Chiang's new tactics. ‘He has learned his lesson. Instead of chasing us and falling into our traps, he is trapping us. Think of a spider's web. He is trying to catch us with this net of turtle-shells, but we'll smash them and break through.’ Huang did not think this could be done. ‘We were ordered to launch short, swift attacks on the blockhouses as soon as they were put up.’ He gesticulated with both arms as if he were pointing at his target. ‘They were near, only a few hundred metres. I could even hear the men talking. But every time we attacked, the artillery fire from the turtle-shells drove us back, leaving the fields strewn with bodies. Our covering fire was too feeble.’

The blockhouse strategy was the key. ‘The only task for troops engaged in the elimination campaign is to build blockhouses,’ Chiang Kaishek told his officers. ‘We build our bases each step of the way, and protect ourselves with blockhouses everywhere. It looks defensive but is offensive,’ Chiang wrote in his diary. ‘When the enemy comes, we defend; when they retreat, we advance … We will exhaust them and then wipe them out.’⁵ He turned Mao's guerrilla warfare on its head, forcing the Red Army to confront his troops in conventional trench warfare. It was a protracted war which he knew they could not win – they simply did not have the resources and manpower to compete. ‘The Reds’ areas are only 250 square kilometres. If we can push on one kilometre every day, we can finish them off within a year,’ Chiang concluded confidently.⁶

Chiang insisted that every battalion build at least one blockhouse a week. Initially it was one every five kilometres, but when the Red Army broke through, he demanded that the distance between the blockhouses should be no more than one kilometre. ‘Anyone who breaks the rule will be court-martialled without mercy,’ he warned. Half way through the Fifth Campaign, 5,873 blockhouses had been built; by the end of 1934, there were 14,000. To link them up, Chiang ordered an extensive network of roads to be built. From barely 500 kilometres of highway in a province of 110,000 square kilometres in 1928, Jiangxi became one of the best-served places in China, with 8,000 kilometres of roads and another 1,000 kilometres under construction, and three major airports.⁷ The trouble was that cars were a rare commodity in the provinces in the 1930s, and the vast network of roads did not link up with the Xian and Gan Rivers, the main transport arteries of Jiangxi. This did not bother Chiang: the important thing was that all roads led to Ruijin.

One day, something came along the road which neither Huang nor his captain had ever seen – tanks. ‘These giant machines crawled towards us like scorpions, with guns firing.’ Huang remembered it vividly. ‘When we saw one coming, we were so shocked we did not know what to do. We took to our heels and fled, and those who didn't became mincemeat.’ All the same, orders arrived from headquarters every day, telling them to hold on unswervingly so that they could eliminate the enemy with disciplined fire and powerful counter-attacks. ‘It was senseless, like throwing an egg at a stone.’ Old Huang threw up his hands. ‘We were worth nothing, pushed forward again and again just to die in waves. Then they built more turtle-shells on our bodies, advancing as we fell back.’

I had seen some remains of the blockhouses on the bus ride to Ruijin, perched on the hills. I was surprised that they had not been knocked down by peasants to build houses or pigsties. ‘There used to be quite a lot,’ said Huang. ‘They were really well built. You have to blow them up with dynamite – not something the Red Army had then or we have now. I don't know. Should we keep them? They are like graveyards. Every time I pass them, I feel as if a lizard is pissing on my spine.’

Was he not frightened then? He was only 14.

‘Frightened? I was scared to death. I wet my pants every day,’ Huang said without hesitation. He regretted he had not run away during the training week or on the way to the front. An older man from his village slipped away when he asked permission to relieve himself in the woods. From then on, they all had to do it in public, but people continued to run away. Of the 800 who trained with him, barely a third made it to the front.

Then it became harder to leave. There was one person in every platoon whose job it was to look out for ‘softies’, and it was old Liu in his. A strong man who was never short of a joke, Liu was almost like a father to him, always asking how he was. Once, when he was on night duty, Liu sat down with him and asked if he missed his parents, and Huang burst into tears. ‘Has anyone offered to take a message home for you?’ Liu asked casually while holding his hand. He blurted out that Uncle Huang, a distant relative in another company, mentioned it in passing a few days back. ‘Good boy.’ Liu patted him on the head and left. He never saw Uncle Huang again. He thought he was killed in the bombing until one day someone said to him, ‘Trouble comes from the mouth.’ Then he understood.

Huang was dying to go home – only fear of being caught stopped him. He was certain they would catch him if he returned home, and after disgracing him and his family they would send him back again. He did not know where the others had gone and they were not telling him. ‘They flew away like birds, you could not stop them,’ Huang sighed. ‘Sometimes, a few were caught and shot in front of everyone, but they just kept disappearing in droves.’

Party archives and documents from the period confirm Huang's story. In November and December 1933, out of at least 60,000 troops, there were 28,000 deserters in the Jiangxi Soviet – Ruijin alone had 4,300.⁸ The political commissar of the 5th Corps wrote in his diary that in September 1934 his 13th Division lost 1,800, or one-third of its men, due to desertion and illness.⁹ Even worse were the militias, who had been forced to help the soldiers dig trenches, move ammunition and carry the wounded to the rear. An urgent memo sent to all the county governments in August 1934 showed the scale of the problem:

Three-quarters of the militia mobilized for the recent battles in the whole Soviet region ran away within the first few days, leaving barely a quarter. It wasn't just ordinary members, but cadres and party officials … This has clearly weakened the Army's capacity and disrupted its operations. It is tantamount to helping the enemy. It cannot be tolerated.¹⁰

‘You know I never wanted to be a soldier,’ Huang said several times when we took the stools inside – it was almost twelve o'clock and he was going to take his long lunchtime siesta. ‘Y o u have to do night duty. It is much better to be a peasant, rising with the sun and resting with the sunset. And it is even better to sleep in the middle of the day. It's nobody's business what I do.’

On the way back to Ruijin, I thought a lot about Soldier Huang and what he had said. He spoke plainly, simply and honestly, with no self-glorification and no apology. He was too much the peasant through and through, open about his weaknesses, wavering and doubts, quite impervious to the propaganda that has permeated our lives. He came across as a real person, unlike all the characters in the Long March books, who are perfect, but less believable. After all, Huang was only 14 when he started out, just a boy. In that deadly first battle, in the test of fire and blood at such a young age, he did not cry out for his mother and father, he did not run away. He held on to his gun, and did so to the very end of the Long March. Whatever fears and doubts he might have had, they were only natural. He was human after all, and a fighter.

What I did not understand was, if Huang could see it was pointless for him and his comrades to be stuck in the trenches, how could the commanders of the Red Army have failed to recognize this? Why did they insist on trench warfare instead of Mao's proven guerrilla tactics? Did it not occur to them to adopt another strategy, or was Braun, the Red Army's Comintern adviser, simply too dogmatic, regardless of the situation on the ground?

I was glad I had someone to ask these questions. I met up with another Huang, a young academic who had been examining the Red Army in Jiangxi. I had read his published articles on the Fifth Campaign and was impressed. As a distinguished Chinese historian said, far too many of his colleagues had made the study of history more like propaganda than academic research. Their task for the past fifty years has been to praise the glorious achievements of the Party, eulogize Mao, and write the history of the Communist Party from his works. They have not always been like that – but sometimes they were not appreciated, and some were suppressed or tortured. After a while, they became so cautious they lost their independence of mind. Now things are changing slowly and a young generation of historians has broken away from the old restraints and is studying history as it should be – and Huang is one of them. He was in Ruijin for field research. I told him about Soldier Huang and he told me it was merely a coincidence they were both Huangs. ‘In Jiangxi, there are many Huang families. Perhaps he and I had one ancestor 500 years ago.’

We decided to have a quick bowl of noodles and then go to Shazhou Village over the lunch hour. It was just outside Ruijin and was the seat of the Party and Headquarters of the Red Army immediately before the Long March. Set in a lush landscape of green hills and ancient trees, it looked timeless except for a couple of souvenir shops selling Red Music, portraits of Mao, Mao stamps, three dozen books on Mao's talents in military affairs, poetry, leadership, interpersonal relations and calligraphy, and a DVD about his life; there were also beautiful girls in Red Army uniforms offering their services as guides.

In the centre of the village stood the imposing old clan shrine, and next to it was a long row of what had once been the lofty mansions of rich clan members. The placards outside announced their erstwhile occupants: the Politbureau, the National Executive Committee, various government departments, and the residences of all the senior leaders, including Mao's at the head of the village, sheltered by a huge camphor tree.

The village was crammed with people, like a country fair. Ruijin has always been regarded as the holy place of the Chinese Revolution. Lately, Party officials have got into the habit of combining tourism with visiting revolutionary sites. Ruijin was a popular choice: to see where the Long March started, to sit under the tree where the senior leaders had debated issues of life and death, to bathe in the eulogies of the masses for the Party, at least in revolutionary songs – the good fortune of so many historical figures of the Chinese Communist Party might rub off on the visitors, whose goal was to climb higher within the Party themselves.

With a group of officials from Beijing, Young Huang and I squeezed into Mao's bedroom, bare and basic, with a bed and a mosquito net, a desk and a chair. Over the desk was a photo of Mao, which the guide said was the only picture of him taken in Ruijin, something I found hard to believe. Mao was gaunt, slightly blank and expressionless. ‘What do you notice?’ the guide asked. ‘It does not look like Mao,’ a plump man replied. ‘Why not?’ ‘I'm not sure, perhaps he does not look his usual confident self.’ ‘You are right,’ she smiled condescendingly. ‘You are very observant. May you go high in your position.’ The man beamed, and the guide continued, ‘When he was in Ruijin, he was out of favour. They had pushed Mao aside and allowed the young and arrogant German called Otto Braun to command the Red Army. Braun was blessed by the Comintern, so he had supreme power; but he was hopeless. That was why the Red Army failed in the Fifth Campaign and had to leave Jiangxi.’

Braun was not popular with the Chinese. A true Bavarian with deep blue eyes and an air of solemnity, he did not speak a word of Chinese, and had little knowledge of China. He drank coffee, not tea; he ate bread rather than rice, even though he had to make it himself; he preferred sausages to stir-fries. However, he did have military experience. He fought in World War I, and then joined the German Communist Party. Arrested and imprisoned in 1920, he escaped to the Soviet Union eight years later and studied at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow. But he angered Mao by dismissing his ideas at their first meeting. How could this ignorant, despotic barbarian tell him how to lead his people? Mao was furious. They disagreed on just about everything, except for their love of nicotine and women. It was not just Mao who was unhappy. Liu Buocheng, the Chief of Staff, was also trained in the Frunze Academy, and was a much more experienced commander. He irritated his young boss when he dared to disagree. ‘You seem to be no better than an ordinary staff officer,’ Braun told him. ‘You wasted your time in the Soviet Union.’¹¹

However, the Chinese treated Braun with reverence; they even called him Tai Shanghung, ‘the supreme emperor’. After all, he was Stalin's envoy, and Moscow's support was paramount for the Chinese Communists – ideologically, politically, financially and militarily. Zhou Enlai, the powerful mandarin of the Communist Party, faced the delicate task of finding a woman robust enough to please Braun. In the end, he came up with a peasant girl, who obliged because she was told it was her ‘revolutionary duty’. So sitting in the house specially built for him, nicknamed the Lone House, with the help of a translator and two packs of cigarettes a day specially brought in from the Nationalist-controlled areas, Braun read the telegrams from the field, and then drew up battle plans for the Red Army. His master plan combined defence and attack: trenches arranged as bulwarks against the blockhouses, and troop detachments behind and on the wings to engage the enemy in ‘short, sharp blows’.

I was curious to know what happened to Braun's Lone House. The guide told me it was torn down long ago. ‘It was not worth keeping, the trouble he brought us. Had he not come, had Mao been in control, the Red Army would not have had to go on the Long March!’ she said in annoyance. Then she took the crowd to another holy spot, the well which Mao helped the villagers to dig, a story we all know from our primary school textbooks. They all wanted to pay their respects, to drink the water, and be as lucky as Mao.

Watching the crowd disperse, Young Huang had a look of disdain on his face. ‘How can they be so irresponsible and ignorant?’ he said angrily. ‘All this superstitious crap. This is the 21st century! And all the blame on Braun. It wasn't his fault really, although he did make a lot of mistakes. He was only 34. He must have thought he was another Napoleon. He gave orders and expected to be obeyed. He even told them where to put the cannons, using maps that weren't any good, and he lost his temper when they corrected him. But as things stood, there was little he could have done to turn the tide. He was not to blame for the Red Army's failures. He did not insist on trench warfare as people are always told, but guerrilla tactics and mobile attacks couldn't work any more. We were trapped, like flies in a spider's web.’

‘The Red Army was stuck in the trenches for a long time.’ I told him Soldier Huang's story. I had questioned him in detail about his experiences in the trenches. The story I knew was that the Red Army won the first four campaigns because of Mao and his guidance, and lost the fifth because of Braun and had to go on the Long March. It seemed logical, and it had gone virtually unchallenged. I accepted it. It occurred to me that subconsciously I was trying to prove the received wisdom.

Huang and I came out of Mao's bedroom and sat down under the huge camphor tree in the courtyard. He drew my attention to the situation that Chiang had to face at the time. Chiang was the head of the Nationalist government, but he did not control the country. Much of it was in the hands of warlords who hated him as much as the Communists did. Each warlord occupied a territory where they levied taxes on peasants’ harvests, even twenty years ahead; they were the largest growers and traffickers of opium, which they sold to raise their armies. In their eyes, Chiang was just another warlord like them who had tried to unify the country with the help of the Communists in 1927, but started killing them too when he realized they were going to challenge him. They pledged loyalty to him when he promised them millions of silver dollars a month, but changed their allegiance whenever it suited them.

The warlords’ internecine wars, their lack of any moral values and ideals except for keeping their power and territory, and the damage they inflicted on the nation, were among the curses of 20th-century China. I had learned all about them in school, but usually we did not associate them with the rise and expansion of Communism. While Chiang was battling it out with them – the biggest battle lasting five months, costing 200 million silver dollars and displacing 2 million people from their homes – the Communists were free to grow and grow. The Red Army in the Jiangxi Soviet expanded its territory, at its peak controlling twenty-one counties with over 3 million people, and built itself up from a guerrilla force of 9,000 men to 100,000. They even created a state within a state. Mao was grateful for the intervention of the warlords and admitted that this was uniquely helpful for the Chinese Revolution. They had a powerful impact on the energy and resources Chiang could put into his campaigns against the Jiangxi Soviet. He had to call off one of his campaigns when the warlords of Guangdong and Guangxi mutinied, almost forcing him out of office.

If Chiang had enough headaches domestically, the Japanese gave him more. Japan had set its eyes on China as if it was its due, an integral part of its imperial ambitions. On 18 September 1931 Japan took China's three north-eastern provinces. A month later, Chiang had to abort his Third Campaign, and his Fourth Campaign eighteen months later, when the Japanese threatened to march on Beiping, today's Beijing. Chiang chose to appease the Japanese – for the time being at least. He knew the country was not ready for a war, but more importantly, he regarded the Japanese as a disease of the skin, and the Communists as one of the heart. ‘If there is no peace within, how can we resist the enemy from outside?’ he appealed to the nation. To the outrage of all Chinese, he allowed Japan a free hand to run China north of the Great Wall. However necessary as a strategy, it set people against him; it would almost cost him his life, and finally it lost him China.

For the time being, though, with this decision Chiang could concentrate on his Fifth and final campaign against the Jiangxi Communists in earnest. He threw in his best troops, 200,000 of them. He assembled his 7,500 senior officers in Lushan Mountain in northern Jiangxi, telling them: ‘The only purpose of this training is for the elimination of the Red Bandits. They are our sole target, and all your preparation, tactical, strategic and operational, is to serve this need.’¹² He gave every officer a copy of handbooks on Eliminating the Red Bandits, Keys to Eliminating the Red Bandits, and The Principles of Training for the Army Engaged in the Elimination Campaign.

As Soldier Huang experienced it, the blockhouse strategy was the key to this campaign. Why then had Chiang not used it earlier? It would have saved him four years, and a lot of money and lives. ‘Blockhouses were not his idea. Chiang admitted himself there was nothing new about his strategy – a 19th-century Chinese general used the very same method to put down a peasant rebellion,’ Young Huang said. ‘But for the strategy to work, it needed time and security, neither of which Chiang had before. This time he did.

‘But contrary to the criticism heaped on Braun, he did not make the mistake of ordering the Red Army to sit in the trenches and wait for the enemy,’ Huang went on. I remembered how he had argued this so convincingly in his thought-provoking articles. The Comintern had in fact instructed the Red Army to play to its strength of mobile and guerrilla warfare.

From past experiences, the Red Army has achieved many victories in mobile warfare, but suffered considerably when it forced frontal attacks in areas where the enemy had built blockhouses … You should not engage in positional warfare, and should move behind the enemy …¹³

Braun agreed entirely: ‘As to positional warfare, whatever form it took, it was not suitable. We were all absolutely clear about it.’¹⁴ He tried to draw the enemy out of their turtle-shells and then launch short, sharp blows to wipe them out. But the trouble was that the enemy refused to come out unless they had full covering fire on the ground and from the air, often with three or four divisions together within 10 kilometres. This made it hard for the Red Army to concentrate enough men and deal them a fatal blow, hard though it tried. Even Chiang noticed this tendency: ‘When we fight the bandits now, they rarely confront us in positional warfare; they frequently attack us by guerrilla tactics.’¹⁵ The battle of Guangchang in April 1934 was an exception, when Soldier Huang and almost the entire Red Army were stuck in their trenches for a month up against the blockhouses. It was the first time this happened, but the battle was not Braun's idea, as he made very clear in his memoir:

The Party leadership considered it a strategically critical point because it barred the way into the heart of the Soviet area. The leadership also believed that unresisting surrender would be politically indefensible.¹⁶

Zhou Enlai agreed with Braun:

Every comrade must realize, the plan by the enemy to take Guangchang is different from the previous four campaigns. It is a strategic step in their penetration into the heart of the Soviet base; it is the key to their overall offensive. We must fight to defend Guangchang.¹⁷

I had talked to the veterans and the expert, and it was clear to them why they lost, but in seventy years, with so many books on the subject, the same argument is still used: if Mao did not lead it, the Revolution would fail. To support this theme, history had to be made to fit the theory. At least militarily, even Mao learned from mistakes, as his memoirs make clear. The Party was only twelve years old, the Red Army half that, the Soviets only three years. The guidance coming from the Comintern was often not based on Chinese reality. Naturally there were mistakes, but a scapegoat was found on whom all the blame for losing the Fifth Campaign was dumped.

Soon after the Guangchang battle, the Party made its decision to launch the Long March; it knew it could no longer defend the Jiangxi base – in fact it informed Moscow so in May 1934 – but some units had to hold the line so the preparations for the Long March could get under way. ‘When we moved house, it would take a few weeks. The Long March was a state on the move, with everything it might need,’ Young Huang said. ‘They had to replenish the troops, to find homes for the sick and wounded, to get together food, money and other supplies. Also where would they go? Nobody knew for sure. That was why they sent out the 6th Corps to blaze the trail, and the 7th Corps to divert the Nationalists’ attack.’

The decision to abandon the Jiangxi Soviet was made in the strictest secrecy. Only the top leaders and military commanders knew about it – Mao himself did not learn of it until August, two months before the departure. There were two fears: firstly that morale would disintegrate, and secondly that the Nationalists would find out. As late as 3 October, two weeks before the Long March, Zhang Wentian, the Chairman of the Soviet Government, continued to call on the people to fight to the end:

For the defence of our regime and of our lives, our children and babies, our land and grain, our cows, hogs, chickens and ducks, and for resistance against enemy slaughter, destruction, looting and rape, we should use our daggers, hunting guns, rifles and any sorts of old and new weapons to arm ourselves … Let our millions of worker and peasant masses become an unbreakable armed force to fight along with our invincible Red Army. We shall completely smash the enemy attack. We must win the final victory! Hold high the Soviet banner! Long live the Soviet regime.¹⁸

This is an ancient Chinese tactic known as the cicada trick: the cicada flies off after it sheds its skin in the autumn, and people are fooled by the skin, thinking it is still there.

But what did ordinary soldiers like Huang know? How far was he involved in the preparations and how much did he know about them? I was keen to find out. As if he knew I was coming, he was waiting for me in his courtyard in the afternoon, wearing a Red Army uniform, complete with octagonal cap. It suited him. ‘I thought you might like it. They gave them to us ten years ago to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Long March. You know I never had a complete uniform until I finished the March!’

When did he know he was going? I asked. ‘I didn't know. Had I known it was going to be that long, I'd have come home straight away, no matter what,’ he said without the slightest hesitation. Did he have any inkling that something was coming up? He took off his cap and scratched his head. ‘Now you ask me, I think it was when I saw new uniforms for the first time. I think the autumn harvest was already in by then.’

He and his company were pulled out of the trenches in late September 1934, and brought to Yudu, which was 60 kilometres from Ruijin. New recruits were brought in to replenish the depleted company – some were older than his father. And there were new uniforms and shoes for everyone. At last he would look like a soldier rather than a beggar. He put on the jacket – it was double layered and he felt so warm, like being by a fire. He never had one like it – it was not necessary in the south, even in winter. ‘Why do we have to carry this heavy stuff? Are we going somewhere cold?’ someone asked, but did not get an answer. Huang was more interested in finding a jacket and shoes that fitted him. Sadly, the jacket was like a coat, and the shoes like boats. They were made for adults. Seeing the tears forming in his eyes, the captain led him into another room. His mouth dropped when he saw the huge stockpile – he had never see so many bullets in his life. He felt as excited as on New Year's Day, when he was given firecrackers. ‘All yours, take as many as you like,’ the captain told him jokingly. He loaded himself up, but the captain took away all but one bandolier and a few grenades. ‘You won't get very far with more than that, my son!’

Soldier Huang had his rifle across his back, a pack with five kilos of rice, a bowl, the patched jacket that his mother had given him, and an extra pair of straw sandals that the captain had made specially for him. A pair of chopsticks were thrust into his puttees. ‘We are going somewhere, aren't we?’ he asked one of the older soldiers. ‘Perhaps we'll go behind the enemy lines, and take the big towns and cities. That's what we used to do after each campaign.’ As he spoke, all the soldiers started talking at once. ‘Now we'll have meat at last.’ Ah, we're going to see beautiful women.’ ‘We'll bring back enough money to feed ourselves through the winter.’ Excitement was in the air, the gloom of the trenches had lifted.

Early one evening, when the moon was big and round, Huang and his company marched along the broad and gentle Yudu River. People came out to say good-bye. Some girls, newly wedded, were standing on tiptoe, looking about anxiously to see their husbands as they passed through. When they spotted them, they cried out with joy, only to be teased by the raucous soldiers in the company. They blushed, ran back, and watched from further off. Others, perhaps organized by the local women's association, were more bold, walking along with the soldiers, and asking, ‘What's your name? Where are you from? Can you win a medal and become a hero?’ It was the men's turn to be shy and tongue-tied. The girls laughed and burst into song:

A model soldier,

That's what I want you to be.

I long for your good news day and night,

My Red Army brother,

Capture a few generals and make me happy!¹⁹

In the crowd, Huang spotted the mother from the family he had been billeted with, who had looked after him like a son. She ran towards him, and pushed two eggs into his hands. ‘Look after yourself, my son,’ she said, barely holding back her tears. Suddenly he felt the pain of what he had learned days before: her son joined the Red Army two years ago and she had not heard from him since. ‘Don't worry, mother. We'll be back soon.’

THREE Water Flowing Upstream

October, the autumn wind blows cool;

Swift the Red Army, swiftly it goes.

By night across Yudu's flow, Old land,

young blood – to victory.

IFOLLOWED THE RED ARMY'S withdrawal to Yudu, and walked by the river outside the town. Its wide expanse was placid, with tree-covered hills on the far shore stretching as far as you could see, dotted here and there with villages; close by a few old boats were tied up to stakes in the shallows. Upstream the scene is much as it was when the Red Army crossed here seventy years ago. The barges that carried the pontoons for the crossing still float on the grey-green water. But right in front of me there was something new: a white obelisk, incongruously large, its size emphasized by small conical evergreens that lead away from it on either side. Its curved sides soared to a peak, and near the top was a large gold star on a red disk. Below this was the inscription: ‘The first fording by the Central Army on the Long March.’ Downstream, some way beyond the monument, stands a majestic four-lane bridge. Large characters on a huge red arch over it announce ‘Long March Bridge’, and smaller characters tell you it was opened in 1996, the sixtieth anniversary of the March.

Like most visitors, I came here to see the starting point of the March, but somehow I felt uneasy that the monument, the bridge, and so many commemorative sites in the town were all celebrating the start of the March. Was not the Red Army's departure also the end of the Jiangxi Soviet Republic? It was the first Communist government in China, and it had collapsed. Was there nothing to be said about that? Chiang's military strength was one reason why the Soviet failed; it was also running out of men and materials, but the reasons might go deeper. Before I embarked on the Marchers’ route, I needed to know more about what had happened here.

I first made for the house where Mao had lived. I had read in the guide book that it was only a short walk from the river in the old quarter of town, but when I asked a young man where it was, he said, ‘What house?’ I was puzzled. Mao's house was normally well known anywhere he had stayed, but the man seemed to know nothing about it. Perhaps he was not a local. I walked further and saw an old lady; although she did tell me the way, I still almost went past it. It was in a side street with a small entrance. There was a red placard: ‘Chairman Mao's Residence, July-October 1934’.

It was locked, so I banged noisily on the door for some time, attracting a few passers-by, before someone answered from inside: ‘We are not open. Go away.’ This was a change; I remembered the crowds that poured through Mao's residence in Ruijin. I shouted I had come a long way and could I just have a quick look? There was total silence, and then the clicking of keys. Finally, the door creaked open, an old man showed himself, and he let me in.

The house and its very small courtyard face west. In China, houses are usually built facing south to enjoy the sunshine. Those facing east or west are inferior; in a traditional compound they are normally for children or junior family members. The courtyard was bare, without the trees that normally adorned Mao's residences. He loved trees. The ancient camphor tree in front of his house in Ruijin bore a placard saying that he often sat under it to read and chat. Inside there was just a dusty portrait on the wall of the sitting room, and some drab information boards below. They carried a very brief summary of Mao's life and his activities in Yudu. A shaky staircase led to the second floor which was where he slept. After Ruijin, this was quite a come-down.

I told the old man my disappointment. ‘What do you expect?’ he asked, lighting a cigarette and taking a puff. ‘Mao only stayed here briefly, and that was when he was really down. When you are down, even dogs don't come near you.’ Then the man went inside and came back with a stool to sit in the sun, puffing away.

The old man had mentioned that Mao spent a lot of time in the house reading and thinking, or pacing in the courtyard. Occasionally he went out to inspect the progress of the pontoons over the river, or talked to the local people. He must have reflected on his life, what had happened that had left him out of the centre of power, isolated here while hectic preparations were being made for the Long March. While his courtyard was so quiet the swallows could land undisturbed, as the caretaker put it, Yudu was a bustling place, busier than on a market day. Whole regiments of soldiers marched in and out of the town gates; mules groaned under heavy loads; orderlies dashed here and there without a minute's rest; peasants pulled bamboo poles and door planks towards the river for the pontoons.

Zhou Enlai only told Mao in August of the decision to leave the base, although it had been made as early as May. Mao had not been consulted, nor had his advice been sought about what to do: what to take or leave behind, who were to go or stay, what route should be taken for the breakout, what would become of the Jiangxi Soviet, whether they were coming back. He only knew that the Red Army was to leave from Yudu, the southern-most county of the Jiangxi Red base, and then head west to join He Long's 2nd Army near the border of Hunan and Hubei. Mao was shown the list of senior Party officials who were to leave. He looked grim as he went through it – many of his close associates were not on it, including one of his brothers. The list had been decided, like everything else, by the trio of Zhou Enlai, the Commissar of the Red Army, Bo Gu, the Party Secretary, and Braun, the Comintern adviser to the Red Army.

Many leaders and senior commanders came through Yudu to check up on the preparations, but few bothered to call on Mao. Gong Chu saw more of him than most. He was Commander of the Red Army in Yudu and of the force left behind to guard the Jiangxi base when the Long March began. He gave a graphic account of Mao's state in the days leading up to the March. Mao had had an attack of malaria and was lank and grey. Gong asked him about his health, and Mao replied: ‘I have not been well recently, but more painful is that I feel extremely low.’¹ He invited Gong to come and see him: ‘I hope you can come and have a chat whenever you have the time in the evenings.’ He took up the invitation; Mao's wife joined them, and she would ‘prepare delicious suppers. The three of us would chat and drink and smoke, often …till midnight …From my observation, Mao's place was not visited by other people except me … It really felt as if he was isolated and miserable.’

On another visit, Gong found Mao sadder still, complaining about his loss of power, how the people who had fought with him in the Jinggang Mountains were pushed aside, and how his Party enemies wanted all the power in their hands. Reflecting on the punishment meted out to him, he even cried. ‘Tears ran down his cheeks. He was coughing from time to time, and his face looked drawn and dried and sallow. Under the flicker of a tiny oil lamp, he was quite a picture of dejection.’²

Mao's state of mind was understandable. He had rescued the Party and founded the Jiangxi base, and was rewarded by being removed from his position. In the 1920s, the young Communists followed every instruction from Moscow religiously. When Moscow told them to work with the Nationalist government, they did so – until Chiang decided that they were too much of a threat. The White Purge of 1927 was horrific in its butchery, and reduced the Communists almost to nothing. But gradually they restored themselves. Next Moscow came up with a plan to organize armed uprisings and take major cities, as had happened in the Russian Revolution. They tried this in Nanchang, Wuhan and Canton – but all of them failed spectacularly.

Mao was instructed to lead an attack on Changsha, a heavily fortified city. Instead, he took his men and headed for the Jinggang Mountains on the border between Hunan and Jiangxi, where Chiang had little control – no doubt inspired by peasant rebels of the past, particularly those immortalized in The Water Margins, his favourite Chinese novel. The book tells of a group of rebels who rose against the Emperor and became 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 Zedong playing base tricks and sending his running dog Li Shaojiu here to slaughter the Jiangxi comrades.’ Liu and his soldiers elected Xiao Dapeng as the new Commander-in-Chief of the 20th Corps as they thought the old one was too weak to protect them. Then they went over to Futian village and set free any members of the Communist Committee who were still alive. Afterwards, Xiao took the 20th Corps to the mountains. Before they left, they held a rally, shouting ‘Down with Mao Zedong!’ ‘Support Zhu De and Peng Dehuai!’ This is what they said of Mao:

He is extremely devious and sly, selfish, and full of megalomania. He orders comrades around, frightens them with charges of crimes, and victimizes them. He rarely holds discussions about Party matters … Whenever he expresses a view, everyone must agree, otherwise he uses the Party organization to clamp down on you, or invents some trumped-up charges to make life absolutely dreadful for you … Not only is he not a revolutionary leader, he is not a … Bolshevik.⁶

Xiao led his men back to Yudu six months later, after he received a message that their appeal to the Party HQ in Shanghai had worked. Little did he know it was a hoax to entice them back. One day in June 1931 – the martyrs’ main death year, as I had noticed in the museum – Mao called for a meeting of all the officers of the 20th Corps in a village in Yudu County; there were more than 200 of them from company level to Xiao the Commander-in-Chief. Just as they sat down in the shrine hall, soldiers pounced on them. They were disarmed and executed. The 20th Corps was abolished, with its 3,000 men killed or dispersed. Before the executions, Xiao and his officers were paraded in villages and towns throughout the Red base as a warning to the masses. As Mao told them at a major rally:

There are the men whom you followed in your blindness! These were the leaders you trusted – men who moved amongst us, pretended to be Communists until they were strong enough to betray us! They used words of Revolution that stirred your hearts, but they were like the leopard that cries in the forest at night with the voice of a human, until men go out in rescue parties, never to return!⁷

But did Mao convince anyone? Had the purge made the base any safer? Had it rallied people, and increased their determination to resist Chiang and defend the Soviet? Was the Red Army stronger or had the Party failed to reckon with the reaction to what they had done, and achieved exactly the opposite? I had to go to Futian to find out more. Before I carried out my research for the journey, the place had been barely on the edge of my consciousness. I did not even know where to look for it on the map, yet it was the scene of this terrible purge, setting the pattern for many more to come. The curse that undermined the Revolution started there.

The journey to Futian from Yudu took me half a day by bus. I passed through undulating countryside, peaceful now, but the scene of many fierce battles during Chiang's five campaigns. I reached Futian Village by motor rickshaw from my bus stop. The place had an air of crumbling grandeur, with many large traditional houses; the name means ‘Rich Soil’, the source of its former wealth, but the houses have been allowed to fall into disrepair, and the streets have pot-holes. Most of the towns and villages in Jiangxi I passed through on my travels, if not exactly rich, were moving with the times; they showed signs of money coming in, new houses, shops, motorbikes, trucks. I could feel hope in the air, toil being rewarded. In Futian Village, there was none of that. It seemed a place that time had forgotten, that history wanted to forget.

I stood for a long time outside the shrine hall that was the HQ of the Jiangxi Communist Committee. Once a fine traditional building, it now looked sad, with layers of faded poster characters from long ago. It was locked and, thinking of what had gone on here, I was not sure I wanted to go in. I just wanted to see the place and talk to people, so I sat down against the wall opposite it. After a while, a man in his 50s came up to me, in a faded blue Mao jacket and wide trousers, as was the custom in the south. ‘You have been sitting here for as long as I've been smoking my pipe. Why?’ I asked him whether he knew people whose families were affected by the Incident. ‘Is there a family that wasn't? Walk into any house, they will tell you. It was like a plague.’

The Futian Incident was followed by a widespread purge which took on a life of its own. People were killed for the flimsiest of reasons. The man's father was a victim. His crime? ‘He said hello to the members of the Jiangxi Committee. But who didn't? This is not a big place. If you fart, the whole village hears. You greet people, it is only human. But that was not how they looked at things. People who spoke, who nodded to each other, who smoked a pipe together, whose fields were next to each other – anybody could be a suspect and taken away. They killed people like we harvest our crops. You know what happened in the end?’ He did not wait for my answer. He was gushing like the river on the edge of the village. ‘Nobody dared to work for the Party any more. When someone was made an official, they cried and wailed. Can you imagine that? And when people from other villages had to come here for some reason, they didn't even dare to enter. They would cup their hands together and shout their message from a long way off. They were afraid to catch the plague.’

While he was talking, two more men squatted down with us and joined the conversation. ‘Madness! It was total madness,’ said one of the newcomers. ‘Nobody could understand what was going on. Red Army was killing Red Army! Communists were killing Communists! How could there be so many enemies anyway? If the men of the 20th Corps and the Jiangxi Committee had been bad people, why hadn't they defected to Chiang Kaishek? Nobody dared to tell Mao that. They were too scared. They kept their mouths shut like a grasshopper on a cold day.’

‘I would say it was paranoia,’ said his companion, while he paused to get out his pipe and tobacco. ‘Chiang Kaishek was too strong, and he scared the stuffing out of Mao. Remember, the purge happened just as Chiang was launching his First Campaign against us.’

They might have had a point about the paranoia. The purge did take place at the height of tension. On top of his military preparations, Chiang also tried a softly-softly approach. Leaflets were dropped from planes, saying anyone who captured Mao and Zhu De would get a reward of $100,000. Red Army troops were encouraged to defect; they were offered $20 for every rifle they handed in.⁸ Envoys and spies were sent to the Red base to persuade generals of the Red Army to mutiny. In fact, some senior Communists did defect. The Communist Party chief in Fujian Province was the first. Another very high-ranking officer, a favourite of Mao's, went over to the Nationalists with information about the Party leaders’ houses, which the Nationalists promptly bombed. It only added to Mao's sense of insecurity.

Mao's purge was not copied from Moscow's tactics; it came before Stalin was to employ such means on any scale. It is estimated that over 20,000 people from the army, the Party, and the Jiangxi Soviet government died in the purge, which lasted just over a year. That was more than the casualties suffered by the Red Army in Chiang's first three campaigns. The purge weakened the Party at a time when it was most vulnerable, and it shook people's faith in the man they thought was their leader. Huang Kecheng, a top commander in the Red Army, first a perpetrator of the purge, and then a victim, spoke the unspeakable in his memoirs fifty years later – historians have praised them for their honesty. ‘How could the Central Bureau [in Ruijin] take over from Mao so quickly? Of course, the comrades in the Red base trusted the Party. But had Mao not lost the support of the people … ? Otherwise it would have been very difficult to push him aside …’⁹ At Futian, in front of that dilapidated shrine hall, I began to understand why Mao lost his power – he had himself destroyed the very source of it.

Futian was also the first open challenge to Mao. He never forgot it or forgave it. The three old men told me that since 1949 many other counties and villages in Jiangxi received favours from Beijing to compensate for their sacrifices to the Revolution, but the den of the ‘reactionary Futian Incident’ was not on the list. The sad state of the village said everything about its neglect. The descendants of the purge victims long continued to suffer Mao's wrath. They were easy targets in each of Mao's campaigns; they could not join the Party or the army; they were not considered for university places or recruitment by factories. The villagers appealed for over half a century to clear their name. Beijing sent senior officials to investigate their case. A leading Party historian in Jiangxi spent a decade pleading their innocence. He died before he heard the conclusion that came out in the official History of the Communist Party: ‘There was never an AB clique in the Communist Party, and the so-called AB members were the result of torture.’ That was in 1991, exactly sixty years after the Incident. Today, there is still no official apology for the people involved. That is why the shrine hall was left to rot. The villagers have not been allowed to commemorate those who died, but they will not forget them. Hopefully, the day will come when people visit the shrine hall as they do the revolutionary sites in Ruijin, and hear the stories of the dead as I did from the three old men. Then the victims of the Futian Incident will not have died entirely in vain.

In Futian, I also began to appreciate the effects of the purges more clearly. If Mao's purges were confined to the Party and the Army, they now moved into wider society and helped to undermine support for the Jiangxi Soviet. The three old men used the metaphor, the first purge was like cutting a man's arm, but what happened later went to the heart. When Zhou Enlai arrived in Ruijin, he did try to limit the damage of Mao's purge and pacify people. He organized public meetings in every county, putting on trial scores of the senior officials responsible for the purge. They were charged as Nationalist spies who had penetrated the Red base and created the Red Terror.¹⁰ They were shot on the spot, and their victims were rehabilitated. However, within a few months the purges started again, this time directed at landlords, rich peasants, traders and so-called ‘class enemies’. Purges seemed to have entered the Communists’ bloodstream as an expression of their cardinal principle – class struggle.

The fundamental issue of the Chinese Revolution was the peasants, and what mattered to the peasants was land. By taking land from the rich and giving it to the poor, the Communist Party won their support. In the Jiangxi Red base, the practice was that rich peasants were given bad land, in swamps or on hillsides, and the landlords were not allowed any – they survived by doing hard labour. The Party determined who was a landlord or a rich peasant. In February 1932, officials were sent to villages to investigate land issues, or more precisely, to discover ‘new enemies of the people’. Futian Village was a natural target, but after Mao's cleansing were there any landlords left? I asked the three wise men sitting with me in front of the shrine hall.

‘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.

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