The Long March. Sun Shuyun

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ