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- [00:01]
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If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
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disney wants to know, are you ready for Marvel Studios Thunderbolts the New Avengers, now streaming on Disney. Let's do this. One of the best Marvel movies of all time is now streame streaming on Disney plus.
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C
Hey, you weren't listening to me.
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B
I said Thunderbolts the New Avengers is now streaming on Disney plus.
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C
Meet the New Avengers.
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A
That's cool then.
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B
Marvel Studios Thunderbolts the New Avengers, rated PG13, now streaming on you guessed it, Disney Plus.
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C
Hello and welcome to Empire with me,
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A
Anita Anand, and me, William Drum. Now, last time we left mao Zedong in 1920, an angry schoolteacher from Changsha who had made his way to Beijing where he was dabbling in the beginnings of anarchism and communism. Today we enter a period when his ideas turn towards violent revolution. This episode covers the 15 years of chaos, civil war and survival that forged the Great Helmsman.
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C
Once again, we are joined by the brilliant Rana Mitta, leading expert on China. His books include Forgotten Ally, China's World War II and modern a Very Short introduction. So let's pick up now from 1920. Officially, China's a modern republic. But in reality, what does it feel like to live in this new republic?
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B
In reality, Anita, living in the early Chinese Republic is a period of immense uncertainty and unpredictability, possibility punctuated by violence. What do I mean by that? On the one hand, if you were younger, if you were, you know, reasonably educated, not necessarily a high level intellectual, but some with some level of education, and if you were urban, then a whole variety of possibilities opened up for you in the republic that simply wouldn't have existed before. You know, just one example, the possibility for young men and women to kind of meet in urban spaces and undertake what was then known as a l' or manti curious relationship, as in romantic. Because of course, this would not have been in that form something that young men and women could have done, naturally, not least because, of course, a generation earlier those women would have had bound feet and wouldn't have been wandering around in parks or getting jobs as schoolteachers. So possibilities were there. And yet the reality was that the hope that the republic would be a constitutional republic with regular general elections and political parties and all the kind of accoutrements of, you know, a modernized state really fell apart in the reality of constant violence from militarist leaders within China. Essentially, the late 19th century had seen China in practice split up between areas that were controlled by different militarist leaders, often nicknamed warlords. And although China had an official government which was based in Beijing, in practice was often, you know, the collection of warlords who could exercise their private armies to get control not just of the capital city, but also of the income flow that came from controlling the customs service that provided a lot of income that actually decided who would rule in China. So a very precarious time, which again, patriots and nationalists of the time tended to feel was symbolic of a revolution that was not completed, that hadn't got well, and which China's younger generation would have to resolve one way or another.
- [03:51]
A
We're coming at this in retrospect and we know that the communists are about to do extraordinary things. But is there any sign of this in 1920, 21? What's the size of the Communist Party? Is it leaping into prominence or not?
- [04:05]
B
Absolutely not. This is basically a group of students, mostly men, who are sitting around in little study societies in Beijing, in Shanghai and elsewhere. Yes, there are small cells in the sense of kind of small groupings of communists that emerge not just in Beijing or even Shanghai, the other major city of the era, but inland as well. We now know that there were sort of communist meeting groups that would talk about Marxist theory at that time. But many of them were drawing much more on a very intellectual understanding that came from reading Russian anarchists, reading accounts of what had happened in Russia in 1917. These weren't revolutionaries in the sense that we understand that term today. That took motivation and organisation, which came from elsewhere.
- [04:53]
C
Okay. They're sitting around, they're reading communist thoughts and having very clever beret wearing coffee, sipping the equivalent of, you know, sort of chats about political theory.
- [05:03]
B
Not the equivalent of Anita. One of the marks of modernity for a young student at that time, in fact, there's quite a lot of writing about it, was drinking coffee, which actually a lot of young Chinese I think didn't really like. Cause it sort of tasted bitter and black and unfamiliar. Instead of drinking tea, which would have been much more natural, but by drinking something that didn't taste great but made you look cool, you were certainly tipping the hat towards modernity. So actually, yeah, literally coffee.
- [05:26]
C
Oh my God. I just. I just stumbled upon a true thing. But, but I wonder whether this must music to the Soviet Union because, you know, you also have a Soviet Union that's flexing like crazy only three, four
- [05:38]
A
years after the revolution.
- [05:39]
C
Yeah, yeah, slightly bampart, and nobody's really in charge. And you've got, you know, sort of this little cadre of, okay, chatty revolutionaries who are sitting around talking about it. That is fertile ground, is it not, for the Soviet Union? Do they not get involved? Do they not try and help? Do they not try and seed the ground a bit more?
- [05:57]
B
You say, was it music to the Soviet Union? It was Shostakovich, it was Prokofiev, and it was even Kalinikov. It was the full gamut. One of the things that is notable about the Soviet revolution is that it doesn't just operate at home. It also gets international very quickly through an institution called the Comintern, in other words, the Communist International, whose job it is to go and foment revolution overseas. And China is indeed seen as a prime spot for that sort of revolutionary development. Now, this isn't a universally held view at the time, because classic Marxist Leninist view was that you had to have an urban proletariat to get a proper revolution going. Germany was always thought to be the place that would happen, and so they were slightly surprised that Russia had actually come through. But if you're going to go to a place that has an urban proletariat, China is not really the place you would choose. I mean, yes, there are some factories in and around Shanghai and elsewhere, but it's not a place that has what Marx would have thought of as a proletarian presence. Nonetheless, it definitely has large amounts of very unhappy, economically deprived people, many of them in the countryside. And, well, Mao would come to be associated with the idea of rural revolution. And we'll certainly talk much more about that. It's worth remembering, as with many things to do with Mao, what he was retrospectively credited with inventing or developing, and which he had, you know, a genuinely important role in, he didn't think of from first principles. Figures like a man called Pungpai, who's now probably quite forgotten, was one of the first instigators of rural revolutionary identity. But the Comintern, the Soviet Union could see an opportunity, even with these sort of indigenous revolutionary movements, to kind of organize, rationalize and mobilize them. And so they send in a variety of people over the years. There's people like Borodin Mn Roy, he's actually Indian, and others who come in to essentially try and whip the revolution into shape. And to cut to the chase, they make a few key decisions that end up being absolutely instrumental to what we now know was the ultimate success of the Communist revolution, but was by no means obvious at the time. So number one was that the Communist Party was not jumping jiving and thriving at that time. It was very small and mostly based in a couple of cities and had zero kind of capacity, your power whatsoever. So what these sort of advisors said was that they had to hook up with another revolutionary movement that would be more successful. And this is what some called the bourgeois revolutionary movement of the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, sometimes written as Kuomintang then under the leadership of Sun Yat Sen at this moment. Sun Yat Sen is important because he is briefly President of China after the revolution when the Emperor's overthrown and then he lasts a few weeks really on the throne.
- [08:38]
A
A nationalist rather than a communist.
- [08:40]
B
Yes, a nationalist and a socialist, not a national socialist. I hasten to add he did not have Nazi tendencies, but someone who believed in more sort of collective economic models. He called it Mincheng, which is usually translated as sort of people's prosperity, but not a communist, but certainly on the left in a broad sense, it's fair to say, and interested in support from the Soviet Union because he tried with his revolution. First of all, he'd been kicked off the presidential chair, but some people still thought of it as a kind of new type of, type of imperial presence and took his revolutionary movement down south to the area of in Guangdong Province, around Canton, Guangzhou to try and get back into power. He didn't show much signs of being very successful at doing that and was looking around for Western support, didn't get any Western support. And then the Soviets come along in 1921, 22, 23 and say we will help you launch a revolution. And part of the terms and conditions when sun accepted was that they should bring the fledgling Communist Party into the Nationalist embrace because the Nationalist Party had been kicked out of power. Rather Sun Yat Sen had been kicked out of power. But the Nationalist Party was still much broader based and much more successful than the tiny Communists. And basically they form under Soviet influence in 1923, the First United Front. So this is a big moment because essentially it's the agreement of the Soviets that they will help both the Nationalists and the Communists. The Nationalists will launch a bourgeois revolution, bit like Russia 1905 and somehow take over the country. And then the implication, although this wasn't stated, was that the Communists would then come from within and launch a Bolshevik style revolution somewhat later. And they cook up much of this stuff in a place that again becomes legendary, still famous even today, the Huangpu Academy Wampoa as it's sometimes known in its English transliteration, where basically political training and revolution and military training trained by top Soviet advisors come together not only to teach people about why they're revolutionaries, but also train them in military tactics so that they can undertake that successful milit uprising which had so eluded them up to this point.
- [10:48]
C
So, I mean, are we talking about, you know, not just inspirational talks, but actual money and arms?
- [10:53]
B
Actual money and arms. Basically, the Comintern is there to ferment revolution in a whole variety of places around the. Around the world. And they're perfectly aware that without proper training and supply of armaments and also of cash, this isn't going to happen. But it's used in sort of fairly judicious ways. You know, the. The Nationalist Party is also able to draw on resources in China as it takes over territory and also look to form alliances of convenience with local militarist leaders. So, you know, someone who would later be condemned as a warlord, a man named Chen Zhongming is basically their host in Guangdong Province. And in the end, they fall out rather spectacularly with him. But his army and his resources are also part of the mix. In other words, the Soviets are important, but they're not the only source of funding and support for the revolution as it comes together.
- [11:40]
C
Rana, what's really interesting in this period, and why I'm slightly becoming obsessed with it, is that, you know, the Comintern are not just looking towards. Towards China, they're looking at other countries of India, like massively getting involved in Indian politics, because they are basically treating anybody with a grudge against the old order, like sort of wind up soldiers winding them up, training them, arming them, giving them rubles galore, and then sending them off into the world to create chaos.
- [12:07]
B
Yes, that's right. I mean, essentially the Comintern is the expression of something that's very central to the Bolshevik revolutionary movement, which is that it should not be simply something that happened to take place in Russia, but rather the beginning of a real shift from the world of nation states, which ended up, of course, ultimately going to war with each other in the Great war, World War I. And instead the shift to class struggle, the idea that in fact it's class and not nations on which the future of the world will be posited. I mean, as we now know, nation states proved a lot more difficult to erase than the Comintern might have thought. But certainly this period, the 1920s, is a very fluid one in which these ideas are still, of course, immensely new. They've only been tried out in one place and we don't yet have course know what we now know that the Cold War would see, you know, large parts of the world placed under the the control of different Communist parties. So at this point, that aspiration combined of course with the really strong rise of anti imperialist feeling in large numbers of Asian and African countries come together in a way that is for the revolutionaries obviously very inspiring and also really disruptive in terms of the global politics of that time.
- [13:17]
A
Rana, you were saying earlier how the Communists, including the Russians, expected the urban proletariat to be the, the vehicle of destiny. Yes, but what you see in 1920s China is more peasant uprisings, isn't it?
- [13:30]
B
Broadly speaking, yes. I mean, there is an attempt, actually not entirely unsuccessful, to try and organize in the cities. But a large part of what happens is out in the countryside. And these two sides matter because what happens while there's this united front that forms in 1923, the Soviets basically bringing together the Nationalists and the Communists, the Kuomintang and the ccp, is that the CCP do get to organize trade unions and workers in the cities, particularly in Shanghai, Canton, Guangzhou and other cities where there are significant numbers of factory workers. Not obviously the kind of level that you'd get in Britain or Germany, but significant at the same time, there is also the development of areas of strong Communist presence in the countryside as well. For instance, in places like Jinggangshan out in the wilds of Jiangxi Province, which is kind of in South Central or East Central China, and very, very rural indeed. Both of these strands were part of the strategy. But the difficulty comes in 1927 when there's a violent split between the Communists and the Nationalists. Sun Yat sen died in 1925 from cancer, and his eventual successor, Chiang Kai Shek, who would essentially become the supreme leader of China from the period from the late 1920s all the way through to World War II. And Bey, unlike Sun Yat Sen, was extremely suspicious of the Soviets and Communist influence. So he ended up purging the Communists.
- [14:54]
A
He'd been there, hadn't he?
- [14:56]
B
He'd been to the Soviet Union. Yes, exactly. He had visited it and been sort of rather disillusioned by what he found there. So although it wasn't clear at the time, he'd been nurturing the desire to essentially clean the Communists out of the movement, probably really in the period around and after Sun's death in 1920, 25 and then, and basically in 1927 when two purges, first in Shanghai Then in Canton, see the destruction, the shooting down and killing of thousands of young communists. At that time, they have to retreat to the countryside because the city is no longer safe for them. So it wasn't that they weren't able to organize in the cities, but the very abrupt, violent ending of the first United Front in 1927 meant that those rural fastnesses were the place where the movement developed next.
- [15:42]
C
And the violence of these times becomes something that is imbibed by Mao. He sort of writes this essay at the time where he says, a revolution is not like inviting people to dinner or writing an essay or painting a picture or doing embroidery. A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another. It was necessary to overthrow completely the authority of the gentry, to knock them down and even stamp them up underfoot. I mean, is this the first time that he is using such violent language about the transformation of his country?
- [16:18]
B
It's certainly one of the turning point moments and it's the inspection of the peasant revolution, the peasant movement in Hunan Province, again, you know, keep coming back to that, that inspires him to write these, these words. But one of the things that is very associated with is doing that kind of on the ground, very in depth examination of what conditions are like in the rural areas now. Now I think it's fair to say that some of this is analysis of what he thinks is needed and some of it is essentially giving in to his own preferences. Because it is actually, if you look at the wider spread of things, not the case that the whole of rural China was in a sort of state of revolutionary ferment waiting to be overturned. Certainly there were significant inequalities in many parts of China, but there were also large parts where the economy was actually doing better and where also the links between family lineages, and again, the sort of structure of families, particularly in South China, family links would actually prevent that violent destruction of one group by another happening in quite so simple a way. So, yes, he spots these real disparities and the poverty that you see in rural China. But already at this stage, he's beginning to impose some of the Marxist ideas that he's learned onto a countryside where Marxist analysis has some value, but is much more complex than he's willing to allow.
- [17:36]
A
Take us back to Chiang Kai Shek for a second, Ranav, because he's such an important figure at this period, paint us a portrait of. When I think of him, I think of a sort of figure with sort of gold braid and sort of wonderful Sort of medals everywhere and, you know, holding a sword.
- [17:51]
B
Chiang Kai Shek one of the things that is worth remembering most centrally about him, I think, because he ends up being a foil, particularly in Mao's writings and Mao's discussions of why the Communist revolution eventually does succeed in taking over China. And so Chiang Kai Shek is portrayed in many cases for very good reason, as reactionary, right wing, conservative, backward, you know, all these sorts of things. And there are reasons to say that much of that has validity, but that's not where he started out. You know, if he'd wanted to be all those things, he would not have chosen to join the Nationalist Revolution as a young man in the 1910s and 1920s. So he's a near contemporary of Mao. He's a little bit older, a few years older, actually. They would end up dying within a year of each other. 1975 for Chang and 1976 for. For Mao. But he also is inspired by many of the same things that Mao was. He believed that China had become a very weak country at the mercy of imperial powers. It lacked military discipline. He went one better than Mao. Said to him that he went to military academy in Japan because although he hated what Japan had done in terms of, you know, invading and occupying Taiwan, for instance, in 1895, he understood that the military discipline and the modernization that modern Japan had managed to undertake during the Meiji restoration of the 1860s was a recipe that China could learn from. He believed that China should be modern, that it should be rational, it should be bureaucratic, and it should be run not by a liberal democracy, but certainly by an authoritarian state in which modernity and rationality and militarism should basically dominate. So in many of those things, he was not a million miles away from Mao.
- [19:27]
A
Were they both Puritans?
- [19:29]
B
Rana Chiang Kai Shek, I think, really was a Puritan. He was a Methodist, amongst other things, although he was a Confucian by training. He frequently refers to Christ and Jesus and Christianity in the pages of his diary. He could have written anything he wanted. He chose to write that. So actually, people say, you know, has China had a Christian leader? Chiang Kai Shek is quite a good answer to that. But, yes, he lived an austere lifestyle, even though he allowed, in the end, massive corruption to flow around him during his period of rule. In terms of Mao, he was certainly very keen on discipline. We'd mentioned before his interest in personal exercise. But he ate and drank pretty indulgently.
- [20:08]
A
So very different figures, personally.
- [20:10]
B
Different and the same. They were both products of the destruction of the old order that came in the late Qing Dynasty. They were both born and brought up during that period. Huge turmoil and turbulence. They both became nationalists who believed that the solution was to turn China into a strong nation state. They were both ideological. Chiang Kai Shek's nationalism was very much driven by an idea of authoritarianism, but also the idea of social welfare of a sort which he got from Sun Yat Sen. He was rather vague about how to achieve it. Mao obviously believed in radical revolution to bring about a new form of welfare. But they both believed in social change as part of what they put together. In the end, yes, personality wise, Chiang was cautious, more taciturn, more withdrawn. But as one of his acolytes put it, he loves to make decisions. Well, Mao as well. Mao loved to make decisions, some of which worked out better than others. But he was mercurial, witty, kind of gratuitously cruel in a way that Chiang Kai Shek was cruel, frequent. But you might say it was sort of business for Mao. It was business and pleasure. They had really quite different sorts of personalities.
- [21:21]
C
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B
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- [22:43]
C
Welcome back. Now, just before the break, Rana, we were talking about about the similarities and the differences between these two men. It's not also one fundamental difference, it's that Chiang Kai Shek is actually a little bit, or quite a lot a bit in fact dubious about the Soviet interest.
- [23:01]
B
That's absolutely right. One profound area of difference between Mao and Chiang Kai Shek was that Chiang Kai Shek very quickly became disillusioned with the idea that the Soviet Union could be the solution to China's problems in any sense. And Mao ended up, along with the rest of the Party, of course, very, very closely allied to Soviet interests. It's worth noting, of course, at this point, Mao is a prominent and significant figure in the Party, but he is not the leader. Whereas Chiang kai Shek, in 1927 he establishes himself as the leader of the
- [23:32]
A
Nationalist Party out of interest. Is that acknowledged today in China or is it implied that he is the leader already in Chinese historiography, the moment
- [23:40]
B
at which he's generally regarded as having become the leader? I think in China, if you took the majority of official views, would be the Zunyi Conference, which takes place during the Long March, which we will, we will get to. So technically speaking, I think he doesn't actually become formally General Secretary of the Party, I want to say, till 1945. He takes over from Zhang Wen Tian, who is probably not a well known name, but is actually technically the leader of the Party at that point. But it's partly because of the way in which leadership authority and leadership positions don't always match with each other in that era.
- [24:13]
C
We'll come to the Long March in a little while, but you know, we're right now, we're in the 1920s, mid-1920s, and you've got this uneasy marriage between the Communists and the Nationalists, specialists, between people who are either very enamoured with or suspicious of what the Soviets are up to. But they do unite in this uneasy marriage with this one mission that they are going to sort out the regional warlords once and for all. These guys who are doing everything they want for their own interest, they've got to be put down. And you have this episode in April 1927 called the White Terror. Tell us a bit more about what this is.
- [24:50]
B
So this is the end point of a campaign that is this year, its 100th anniversary. So many people may not be looking back to 1926 as the start of the Northern Expedition. It's basically a military campaign in which the united front of the Nationalists under Chiang Kai Shek, the Communists with various leaders, but Mao is in the mix and of course the support of the Soviet Union come Together, starting from southern China, from Guangdong, to move north to essentially take over the government of the country country. And although it's a slow and not always linear progression, mainly up the east coast of China, by 1927, they have broadly speaking, managed to either fight, bribe, cajole, or coerce other militarist leaders within China, in many parts of eastern China anyway, to unite under one government, which is essentially under Chiang Kai Shek's control. Formally. It happened in 1928 with the establishment of a new nationalist government, the Kuomintang government of China, which actually moves the capital from Beijing to Nanjing, or Nanking, as it was known in the west at that time. The reason being that Nanjing is right in the heartland of Chiang Kai Shek's area of control. It's also actually that region is his birthplace. He was born in Xikou in Zhejiang Province in east central China. Beijing was too far north. It was sort of in the essentially the area of other warlords control and so wouldn't have been politically useful. But that's the point where Chiang Kai Shek, who has been nurturing an increasing suspicion that the Soviets only want to encourage his revolution, the Northern Expedition, which unites China, so they can then launch a Bolshevik revolution of their own in which the Communists will take over and he strikes first. That's why there is this vicious, violent turning on communists in Shanghai and then Canton in Guangzhou.
- [26:38]
A
What form does that take? Are there knocks on the door in the middle of the night and this sort of thing, or how does it.
- [26:44]
C
Yeah. Are they killing people or arresting them or what are they doing?
- [26:47]
B
Yeah, there's knocks on the doors, but, you know, it's much more brutal than that. Even they just round up people. And we're talking about, you know, young revolutionaries in their 20s, maybe even in their teens, young, idealistic, they've joined the Communist Party. Suddenly they're rounded up and gunned down in the streets, or they're tied together, their bodies are thrown into the river, they're kind of floating down the Huangpu. It's made very clear that this is a violent coup against people who until five minutes before had been coalition partners. It is worth saying, just as a matter of objective historical analysis, that Chiang Kai Shek was probably not wrong that the purpose of the Comintern was to ferment a violent Bolshevik revolution in China off the back of a bourgeois revolution. But the fact is that the people who ended up paying for this were mostly the young and often, you know, extremely sort of wet behind the ears revolutionaries who were part of that insurgent force and not the kind of grizzled old commanders who mostly managed to escape.
- [27:43]
C
Do we know how many died? I mean, how many were killed in this purge?
- [27:46]
B
I don't think we have exact figures, partly because they, you know, for obvious reasons, didn't necessarily keep a huge tally. But we're certainly talking about thousands of people at that time. I mean, to explain one of the things that happened and one of the reasons why it's hard to get numbers. Numbers. One particularly important figure in Shanghai rounding up, arresting, killing large numbers of communists was a man who went by the attractive name of Big Ears Du Du Yershang, who was the leader of the Qingbang, the Green Gang, the biggest mafia in Shanghai at that time.
- [28:17]
A
Big Ears has very much sort of Chicago slang from sort of Al Capone
- [28:21]
B
era, you know, he and his gang and the Nationalist Party or the pas de la Chiang Kai Shek and his military wing were very much in cahoots at that time. And quite often it would be the mafiosi, not the commissioned soldiers, who would actually be rounding up and killing students and young communist fighters, which is one of the reasons again, the mafia do a lot of things, but they don't tend to keep numbers, or at least not in the open.
- [28:46]
A
I'm only quite impressed by Big Ear's ears Rana, having looked him up.
- [28:51]
C
I mean, they're not noddy proportion. Big Ears Rana.
- [28:54]
B
I have to, Anita, what I can say is that if you would have been felt bold enough in say, 1927 to go up to Tu Yusheng, the leader of the most vicious and violent gang in the whole of Shanghai and controller of half the city, and say, actually your ears aren't really as big as I thought they were, as fast as I felt. Please be my guest.
- [29:14]
A
We haven't heard what happened to Mao in the middle of it.
- [29:16]
C
Yes. How does he survive it?
- [29:17]
B
By this stage, the communist movement has split, split into two broad strands, one of which is the urban strand, which involves many of the people who are rounded up and killed, and then a rural strand. Now, one of the things that distinguishes Mao and what he becomes famous for is the idea of rural revolution. So he's never a revolution the city guy. In some ways, he is very much someone who believes that it's the peasantry who are going to be where the revolution is unleashed, a fish in the
- [29:46]
A
water, whatever the phrase is.
- [29:47]
B
Exactly. The party members should be fish who swim in the water of the the people, or something along those lines, and possibly get hooked out by various People with fishing rods. But we'll come to that. The rural areas, which are often very, very hard scrabble, very, very impoverished, become the center for the rural part of the revolution. And Mao becomes particularly embedded in a base area that's set up in Jiangxi Province in east south central China.
- [30:12]
A
And is that partly because he's from that background and is considered someone who's good with peasants and he sounds like he's a peasant, or how does he end up being there?
- [30:20]
B
It's there a whole variety of factional kind of disputes within the Party at that time. Bearing in mind Mao is not at this point the Mao who will become the supreme leader that we know of, you know, during his period in power, that Mao, finger in the wind, but I'd say doesn't really emerge until the mid-1940s at the. the earliest. At this point, you have to think of the Party. It's still, you know, relatively small. It's been viciously battered by the coup against it in the cities by Chiang kai Shek in 1927. So the countryside and the people who've been based out there, from being one part of a division between rural and urban, now become really the kind of the whole, in a sense, and they are consumed with a very different set of questions, and those are questions on which, yes, Mao is more expert. So let me give a specific example of what we're thinking of in terms of the peasantry. There's a wonderfully interesting analysis of one particular county, a place called Xinwu, written by Mao. It's one of his early writings, dates from 1930, and it's been translated into English under the title Report from Xinwu Xunwu by the historian Roger Thompson. And he's done a fabulous translation and commentary of this, and it's a wonderful thing to read because it's probably the single longest and most relevant early reading by Mao, not about ideology, revolution or even buttock thrusts in his personal exercise plan, which we dealt with in a previous episode briefly, but actually the thing he becomes best known for as a political analyst, which is what the countryside's really like and how it works, and considering how hidebound, how kind of stylized and how, you know, destructive his model of class war became in later decades. Reading a report from Shinwa is fascinating because it's about someone who is observing what he actually sees rather than trying to fit it into ideological categories. And it's, you know, it has everything about, you know, who goes to the market, which women are allowed of the house, and which aren't. And there's a character who is, I think, a sort of not particularly beloved local trader or merchant, whose name is translated as Uncle Shitcrock, which is not, I think, a term of affection. It also actually marks the beginning of what in his life would be a very long list of scatological references which rather distinguish Mao's writing about his world. It's such a weird combination of Marxist theory and obsession with toilets. So he, at one point, some years later, says, the condition of the peasantry, which is not yet fully brought into proletarian consciousness, is like a man who is squatting down and trying to shit, but unable to actually get the shit out. And it is only when you know it has made its way through the digestive system that you will get full fulfillment from your laboratorial activity and that the peasantry, I guess, will be fully proletarianised.
- [33:04]
A
This, again, is another improbable link with Gandhi, who's also obsessed with this area of life.
- [33:11]
C
Well, he talked about his own, but he didn't like his sort of revolution to basically pooping in a field.
- [33:16]
A
Have you never been to the Gandhian Toilet Museum in Delhi, which is a very important part?
- [33:21]
C
I have, I have. I knew about his toilets. Back to Mao, though.
- [33:25]
B
Back to the countryside. Anyway, Uncle Shit Croc's doing his stuff in. In Shinwa. But the point is that it's a very detailed, you know, sociological account, essentially, of, you know, everything that's happening at a very granular level. And it shows the level of serious, detailed political investigation that Mao was doing as part of building up his view of what revolution should be.
- [33:45]
C
But we also get at this time a little glimpse into the Mao of the future as well, because, you know, they're having the nationalists press down upon them, you know, sort of wiping out thousands of their followers, the cities. And in response, what Mao decides to do is get really paranoid and say, you know what? At this time of great adversity, I'm going to kill some of my comrades, because I don't think that they are trustworthy. And you have this enormous bloodletting.
- [34:09]
B
Absolutely, yes. Beleaguered revolutionary clique descends into paranoia and murderous anarchy. Who would have thunk it? You know, it wasn't the first time. It wouldn't be the last time either. Not just in China, but, you know, you can think of plenty other examples. Yes, you're absolutely right. I mean, what you. It was called the Fu Tian incident. And, you know, it's not the only one. Essentially, different members of the party Leadership in, out in Jiangxi Province, this very rural area, are paranoid about each other. Are they Kuomintang spies? Are they, you know, being influenced by foreigners, whatever it might, might be some reason to think that if you don't get them, they will get you. And of course, once you start thinking that you must kill your, you know, your comrades before they kill you, the paranoia. Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean they're not allowed to get you. To use the old phrase, this is one of the things is not talked about in China because for two reasons. One is that the idea that, you know, this sort of founder of the Chinese revolution engaged, as you say, in a kind of huge competitive bloodletting at this point isn't, you know, great for the, the image. And second, and probably even more important, in a sense, there's absolutely no evidence that any of these things were true, that, you know, that they were all secretly gorming down spies, whatever it might be. It was genuine paranoia in the sense it was not, it seems, based on reality. There was a point to be, to be bending over backwards, to be mildly fair here. There is an occasion, I think, in 1930, when one of the party papers, Communist Party newspapers that's not controlled by Mao, his obituary turns up in it. And since, you know, Mao was still very much alive at that time, if you picked up the paper and found your obituary had been printed, you might also feel a little antsy.
- [35:46]
A
Grumpy, no, suspicious.
- [35:49]
B
At least, at the very least, what the editor of the party newspaper had in mind for you. So, yes, but essentially as a sort of factor contributing to the downf of the Communists in Jiangxi, the kind of massively violent bloodletting was certainly part of it.
- [36:04]
C
But, Rana, everyone's at it. I mean, that's the thing that's really astonishing.
- [36:08]
B
So true, so true.
- [36:09]
C
Because you also got, you know, the Nationalists doing this. So it hits really close to Mao's own home. A nationalist warlord in 1930, about the same sort of time, captures Mao's sister and then gives her this choice. Publicly denounce your brother, dissolve your marriage, or die. And she says, okay, I'll die then. And she's executed. I mean, she, she's. So this denouncing thing, is that. What is this new to Chinese politics? Or is this a thing that has always been there, that you must be humiliated, denounce and then be tortured and die?
- [36:42]
B
It's certainly the case that the Chinese imperial court, at least, you know, over the dynasties, when things were getting, you know, heated were places of real intrigue. And there people will not just be denouncing each other to basically kind of destroy rival factions to the emperor's ear and get to power, but, you know, would literally, you know, have family members of rival factions, you know, captured and murdered and sliced up and, you know, parts of their bodies placed in vessels full of liquid. So it could be pretty, pretty hardcore stuff. I would say that the trend that emerges in the Communist Party is partly drawn from that sort of, you know, understanding of power being zero sum, which I think, you know, in some ways was very much part of the non Confucian side of Chinese imperial culture. The Confucian side was more about kind of harmony and living together and so forth. But the other side was purely vicious. But it is also a modern phenomenon. And you say, where does it come from? In part it comes from Soviet influence. This is by now the time of Stalin. You know, Lenin, who wasn't exactly a kind of shrinking violet and also actually wrote extensively on the need for terror as part of his theory of democratic centralism gives way to or dies and, you know, Stalin takes over. And Stalin's power paranoia certainly infiltrates the common turn and elsewhere in terms of wanting to make sure there are no alternative centers of power that could possibly topple him. But the same sort of feeling also influences many of the Chinese Communists. The difference being that Stalin, by then, at least in his own terms, is pretty solidly in power in the Soviet Union, whereas the Chinese Communists are nowhere near power. They rule bits of Jiangxi province, but they're not fully in control there and they're on the run because the Nationalists are undertaking. And again, this is part of the recent paranoia. During much of the early 19th 30s, the Campaign to surround by the Nationalists, to surround and destroy the Communists in Jiangxi, is literally called the extermination campaign. So if you know that your major political opponent has got a whole bunch of soldiers coming on something called the extermination campaign, that also might make you a little bit champion. I think there were four or five of them actually in the end. So it's not just a one off.
- [38:49]
A
Rana, do you have any impression at this period that Mao is any more ruthless than any of his colleagues and any more fearsome and violent?
- [38:57]
B
I wouldn't say that Mao was necessarily the kind of most violent of these, but certainly he was very happy to play in that particular pool.
- [39:04]
C
But he's in a mess. I mean, by 1934 the nationalists have caught up with him and as you say, they've Got this extermination plan.
- [39:12]
B
Clue is in the name.
- [39:13]
C
I mean, yeah, it does what it says on the tin. So the way they do this is that they encircle Mao here in the countryside. You've got Mao and all his followers are facing complete annihilation. And this is when they develop. What is written in China these days is this fantastic strategy that they outmaneuver a superior force that has encircled them, and it's known as the Long March. Now, in the mythology, they take everything that's not nailed down and they march out and they completely foil this, you know, cordon that's around them. And they get out and they save themselves taking printing machines, X ray machines. I mean, if you're carrying that much stuff, it's not. Not so much a march as a crawl. But they do manage to get out, but not without cost. I mean, the Long March is a hideous, terrible thing. For the people who are on it,
- [40:06]
B
the Long March is a defeat. There is no question about it. It has, as you say, become a legendary event.
- [40:12]
A
How interesting is that the reality?
- [40:14]
B
Well, yes, because, I mean, if, you know, you were kind of running your little Soviet area in Jiangxi Province and everything was going fine, you weren't kind of murdering your comrades, then you wouldn't suddenly have the need to go on a massive expedition that involved traveling through backcountry over thousands and thousands of miles.
- [40:28]
C
You're running away.
- [40:29]
B
Yeah, running away. Losing 90% of your personnel on the way. There's a reason that Long March veterans, people who made it all the way to one of the end points, are considered to be essentially, you know, Communist royalty, in that they were the true believers who really, really insisted on going to the end when, As I say, nine out of 10 people either were killed or basically decided that, you know, sod this for a laugh, and disappeared off elsewhere. It became inevitable because nationalist assault on the Jiangxi Soviet became too difficult to resist. They used new tactics called block houses, which basically blockaded the area. But also, and this is significant in terms of what Mao learns, a lot of locals begun to turn against them. Initially, the Jiangxi Soviet hadn't been particularly communist, for want of a better word. You know, they'd brought in local warlords and basically said, oh, you're part of the Communist army now. And they're like, oh, okay, fine. But they kind of could carry on raiding and doing their stuff, and they weren't that bothered. By the time you get to the period when they're beginning to try and sort of eliminate some of These military leaders and also, you know, reorient land holdings and so forth, or, you know, property and so forth amongst the locals. Lots of locals are not very keen on this at all. And there's a strong feeling that the Communists are no longer welcome. So they're also feeling cold shoulder in their own territory by that phase. So for all these reasons, but primarily because the Nationalist military is finally getting its act together and looks like it's going to kick them out, they have to launch this series of expeditions. Remember, the Long March is not just one march. There are different columns that go in slightly different routes. And even at the end point, there's not one single end point either.
- [42:06]
A
And the numbers run and we're talking about what, 80,000 people, and there's air raids, they're being chased all the way.
- [42:12]
B
So this starts in autumn of 1934 that the sort of big march of troops retreating from Jiangxi begins. And it's more than a year before they get to their eventual endpoint in Shaanxi Province and the northwest of China, where they're finally able to set up a new set of bases, largely at the city of Ba', an, but elsewhere. It starts off from what we know in a fairly ordered way. You know, this is a huge group of people, and technically it's now one of the first fronts of the Red Army. This is a term that you can start to use at that point because after 1927, when the sudden, vicious, you know, slaughtering of large numbers of Communist members, they decided they should never be dependent again on the military of another organization, meaning the Nationalists in this case. And so they essentially start to set up the institution that became the Red army, and the uprisings of peasant uprisings, the countryside in Jiangxi and elsewhere that are regarded as sort of the start point, the birthplace of what is actually today's People's Liberation Army. A very, very different civilization, huge, massive, technologically enabled one, but it traces history back to the 1920s and 1930s and that Jiangxi period. So this is a significant army that's setting out of the long march by 1934. It's not just sort of raggle tackle. And of course they have Soviet advisors and other people on the way as well.
- [43:28]
A
And the Soviets are on board at this point. They've abandoned the Nationalists. They're very much supporting the ccp.
- [43:33]
B
They are. Well, it's not so much that they've abandoned the Nationalists, it's more the Nationalists have abandoned them. Chiang Kai Shek makes it very clear that he has no intention of allowing Soviet influence to continue.
- [43:43]
A
I want a picture of the long march run so that the people are marching in rank and file down a whole series of roads in uniform. I mean, they're driving cattle with them. What's the nature of it? There are air raids. What's going on?
- [43:56]
B
You know, large numbers of people in formation. These are trained troops. Now they've had that Soviet influence. I mean, again, much of the countryside into which they're having to is fairly hard scrabble. There's also different columns that emerge at different times. Some of the senior leaders and other figures are being carried at various points. They're not necessarily literally all walking, but they don't have, you know, military transportation or vehicles. The vast majority of what is being done is genuine, you know, walking, marching. They bivouac, they camp. Obviously, you know, particularly in the initial theory, when you've got that many people, you have to have camp cooks and people who are providing, you know, sort of kitchen equipment.
- [44:34]
A
I mean, cooks for 80,000 people. There's no small feat of organization.
- [44:40]
B
No small feat. No, no, absolutely. But it's probably one of the reasons why they start to lose people after a while, because keeping them supplied was a big deal. It's not like they sort of necessarily have canteens or supply lines coming in from somewhere to restock them.
- [44:51]
A
Are they marching animals with them? Are there kind of lines of pigs and sheep following them along the roads?
- [44:56]
B
I don't think pigs and sheep, although I'd be happy to be corrected on that. Horses, certainly, in some cases. But what happens is that they're having to negotiate, either negotiate in various areas to get hold of sufficient, or in some cases, I think, pretty sure they're raiding. Essentially, part of the message is supposed to be that the communists are different from the nationalists. They don't just go in and steal from the people, but at the same time, there's often a thin line between not stealing and, say, coercing the sale of foodstuffs and other products, particularly if the currency you're using isn't necessarily easily exchangeable. So I think this grouping turning up in a village and suggesting that it would be a very good idea if everyone got fed was probably an invitation that few peasants could. Could say no to.
- [45:40]
A
During this period, air power is now a very important part of warfare. There are massive air raids on these columns, and among those who get badly injured is Mao's wife, who has a very bad time of it.
- [45:53]
B
Yes, Hechen is injured by a passing plane. It's fair to say that While there is a bit of use of air power at this stage, this is not still something that's commonplace in China. The Nationalists have a very small air force. It's not a very good air force, to be honest, at that point. Even if it didn't happen very often, it would be quite terrifying, I think, for people who were on the march at that time.
- [46:13]
C
Awful. Yeah. And for Mal's wife, really particularly awful. Cause as Willy says, not only does she get hurt, but she also is forced to give birth to her daughter in a straw hut during the march. And because it's so hard to take children with you to feed them, to know where the next meal is gonna come from, this couple is forced to give up their child to a local peasant family along the route, and they never see her again.
- [46:37]
B
Children almost certainly, actually were mostly left behind. That's one of the things you find plenty of stories of people who. Small children who are, you know, essentially given away to village families is very tragic because they couldn't be maintained on a march like that.
- [46:51]
C
So this is, you know, as you say, it's painted as this great heroic episode in Communist China, but actually, you know, beleaguered, destroyed people and, you know, the lucky survivors end up somewhere alive. Where does Mao end up and how do we mark the end of the Long March?
- [47:09]
B
Two things just to say in terms of Long March significance, briefly, but I think importantly. The first is that there is one moment that happens within the march in 1935 at a place called Zhongyi, partway along the march. And this is generally seen by the Communists today as the sort of trigger point for Mao's rise to leadership, because there's basically a conference in which the Soviets and the Chinese Communists accuse each other of where did it all go wrong? How come? We're kind of on the run here. We thought it was all going great, and it didn't. And Mao's voice in that was, in retrospect, has been made the most important one. Actually, it probably wasn't, but it was an important moment in terms of his rise to power. So the Long March goes on, and then, you know, more than a year after they've set out from Jiangxi, different divisions of the Red army end up in different places. But the central and most important immediate place is a place called Bao' an in Shanxi Province in northwest China. And that's where it becomes important, because Mao and other people around him make a base there, and then a while later, move to a place which becomes much more legendary, called Yenan which actually becomes the real communist capital, you might say, from the mid-1930s all the way until actually the civil war in the late 1940s. So the long March ends in several places relatively close to each other.
- [48:27]
A
So by 1935, Rana, the March has reached its conclusion. There's been massive bloodshed, but it's been good for Mao. Mao has risen in the ranks and many of his rivals perhaps have been
- [48:40]
B
removed, yes, from being a prominent but in some ways controversial member of the communist leadership. I mean, he always was one of those. And of course, a founder member of the party in his own right. Back in 1921, as the Long March comes to an end, as the party settles in Ba', an, then later moves on to Yenan, Mao is at the cusp of the set of military, ideological, and in many cases, very personal choices that will bring him in time to supreme power within the Party.
- [49:12]
C
Just remember, this is at the same time that Imperial Japan has got its eye on China and is about to unleash one of the most violent occupations in its history. And in that next episode that we will bring to you, we're going to see how Mao, rising up through the ranks, is going to deal with the Japanese and the communists as he rises to that position that, you know, we now know him as the chairman. And Willi, if people want to hear the next episode, what do they do?
- [49:41]
A
If they want to hear the next episode with our wonderful guest, Rana, and indeed the rest of this series, then they need to join the Empire Club. I would recommend that you forego a pint next month, and instead, for the same price, you can get early access, free free shows, a weekly newsletter and book discounts. Empirepoduk.com that's where you need to go this minute.
- [50:04]
C
Anyway, listen, that's all we've got time for. Thank you very much, Rana, and we will be speaking to you again. Till the next time we meet, though, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand, and me, William Dalrymple.