With a group of officials from Beijing, Young Huang and I squeezed into Mao's bedroom, bare and basic, with a bed and a mosquito net, a desk and a chair. Over the desk was a photo of Mao, which the guide said was the only picture of him taken in Ruijin, something I found hard to believe. Mao was gaunt, slightly blank and expressionless. ‘What do you notice?’ the guide asked. ‘It does not look like Mao,’ a plump man replied. ‘Why not?’ ‘I'm not sure, perhaps he does not look his usual confident self.’ ‘You are right,’ she smiled condescendingly. ‘You are very observant. May you go high in your position.’ The man beamed, and the guide continued, ‘When he was in Ruijin, he was out of favour. They had pushed Mao aside and allowed the young and arrogant German called Otto Braun to command the Red Army. Braun was blessed by the Comintern, so he had supreme power; but he was hopeless. That was why the Red Army failed in the Fifth Campaign and had to leave Jiangxi.’
Braun was not popular with the Chinese. A true Bavarian with deep blue eyes and an air of solemnity, he did not speak a word of Chinese, and had little knowledge of China. He drank coffee, not tea; he ate bread rather than rice, even though he had to make it himself; he preferred sausages to stir-fries. However, he did have military experience. He fought in World War I, and then joined the German Communist Party. Arrested and imprisoned in 1920, he escaped to the Soviet Union eight years later and studied at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow. But he angered Mao by dismissing his ideas at their first meeting. How could this ignorant, despotic barbarian tell him how to lead his people? Mao was furious. They disagreed on just about everything, except for their love of nicotine and women. It was not just Mao who was unhappy. Liu Buocheng, the Chief of Staff, was also trained in the Frunze Academy, and was a much more experienced commander. He irritated his young boss when he dared to disagree. ‘You seem to be no better than an ordinary staff officer,’ Braun told him. ‘You wasted your time in the Soviet Union.’11
However, the Chinese treated Braun with reverence; they even called him Tai Shanghung, ‘the supreme emperor’. After all, he was Stalin's envoy, and Moscow's support was paramount for the Chinese Communists – ideologically, politically, financially and militarily. Zhou Enlai, the powerful mandarin of the Communist Party, faced the delicate task of finding a woman robust enough to please Braun. In the end, he came up with a peasant girl, who obliged because she was told it was her ‘revolutionary duty’. So sitting in the house specially built for him, nicknamed the Lone House, with the help of a translator and two packs of cigarettes a day specially brought in from the Nationalist-controlled areas, Braun read the telegrams from the field, and then drew up battle plans for the Red Army. His master plan combined defence and attack: trenches arranged as bulwarks against the blockhouses, and troop detachments behind and on the wings to engage the enemy in ‘short, sharp blows’.
I was curious to know what happened to Braun's Lone House. The guide told me it was torn down long ago. ‘It was not worth keeping, the trouble he brought us. Had he not come, had Mao been in control, the Red Army would not have had to go on the Long March!’ she said in annoyance. Then she took the crowd to another holy spot, the well which Mao helped the villagers to dig, a story we all know from our primary school textbooks. They all wanted to pay their respects, to drink the water, and be as lucky as Mao.
Watching the crowd disperse, Young Huang had a look of disdain on his face. ‘How can they be so irresponsible and ignorant?’ he said angrily. ‘All this superstitious crap. This is the 21st century! And all the blame on Braun. It wasn't his fault really, although he did make a lot of mistakes. He was only 34. He must have thought he was another Napoleon. He gave orders and expected to be obeyed. He even told them where to put the cannons, using maps that weren't any good, and he lost his temper when they corrected him. But as things stood, there was little he could have done to turn the tide. He was not to blame for the Red Army's failures. He did not insist on trench warfare as people are always told, but guerrilla tactics and mobile attacks couldn't work any more. We were trapped, like flies in a spider's web.’
‘The Red Army was stuck in the trenches for a long time.’ I told him Soldier Huang's story. I had questioned him in detail about his experiences in the trenches. The story I knew was that the Red Army won the first four campaigns because of Mao and his guidance, and lost the fifth because of Braun and had to go on the Long March. It seemed logical, and it had gone virtually unchallenged. I accepted it. It occurred to me that subconsciously I was trying to prove the received wisdom.
Huang and I came out of Mao's bedroom and sat down under the huge camphor tree in the courtyard. He drew my attention to the situation that Chiang had to face at the time. Chiang was the head of the Nationalist government, but he did not control the country. Much of it was in the hands of warlords who hated him as much as the Communists did. Each warlord occupied a territory where they levied taxes on peasants’ harvests, even twenty years ahead; they were the largest growers and traffickers of opium, which they sold to raise their armies. In their eyes, Chiang was just another warlord like them who had tried to unify the country with the help of the Communists in 1927, but started killing them too when he realized they were going to challenge him. They pledged loyalty to him when he promised them millions of silver dollars a month, but changed their allegiance whenever it suited them.
The warlords’ internecine wars, their lack of any moral values and ideals except for keeping their power and territory, and the damage they inflicted on the nation, were among the curses of 20th-century China. I had learned all about them in school, but usually we did not associate them with the rise and expansion of Communism. While Chiang was battling it out with them – the biggest battle lasting five months, costing 200 million silver dollars and displacing 2 million people from their homes – the Communists were free to grow and grow. The Red Army in the Jiangxi Soviet expanded its territory, at its peak controlling twenty-one counties with over 3 million people, and built itself up from a guerrilla force of 9,000 men to 100,000. They even created a state within a state. Mao was grateful for the intervention of the warlords and admitted that this was uniquely helpful for the Chinese Revolution. They had a powerful impact on the energy and resources Chiang could put into his campaigns against the Jiangxi Soviet. He had to call off one of his campaigns when the warlords of Guangdong and Guangxi mutinied, almost forcing him out of office.
If Chiang had enough headaches domestically, the Japanese gave him more. Japan had set its eyes on China as if it was its due, an integral part of its imperial ambitions. On 18 September 1931 Japan took China's three north-eastern provinces. A month later, Chiang had to abort his Third Campaign, and his Fourth Campaign eighteen months later, when the Japanese threatened to march on Beiping, today's Beijing. Chiang chose to appease the Japanese – for the time being at least. He knew the country was not ready for a war, but more importantly, he regarded the Japanese as a disease of the skin, and the Communists as one of the heart. ‘If there is no peace within, how can we resist the enemy from outside?’ he appealed to the nation. To the outrage of all Chinese, he allowed Japan a free hand to run China north of the Great Wall. However necessary as a strategy, it set people against him; it would almost cost him his life, and finally it lost him China.
For the time being, though, with this decision Chiang could concentrate on his Fifth and final campaign against the Jiangxi Communists in earnest. He threw in his best troops, 200,000 of them. He assembled his 7,500 senior officers in Lushan Mountain in northern Jiangxi, telling them: ‘The only purpose of this training is for the elimination of the Red Bandits. They are our sole target, and all your preparation, tactical, strategic and operational, is to serve this need.’12 He gave every officer a copy of handbooks on Eliminating the Red Bandits, Keys to Eliminating the Red Bandits, and The Principles of Training for the Army Engaged in the Elimination Campaign.
As Soldier Huang experienced it, the blockhouse strategy was the key to this campaign. Why then had Chiang not used it earlier? It would have saved him four years, and a lot of money and lives. ‘Blockhouses were not his idea. Chiang admitted himself there was nothing new about his strategy – a 19th-century Chinese general used the very same method to put down a peasant rebellion,’ Young Huang said. ‘But for the