The Long March. Sun Shuyun

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ