The Long March. Sun Shuyun

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ