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