Читать книгу The Long March - Sun Shuyun - Страница 9

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.