339. Chairman Mao: China's Communist Uprising (Ep 2)

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of MPa a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter sign up to MPa Club at www.mpaPoduk.com Hello and welcome to MPa with me Anita Arnand. And me William Durimple. Now last time we left about Zidong in 1920 an angry schoolteacher from Changshua who had made his way to Beijing where he was dabbling in the beginnings of anarchism and communism. Today we enter period when his ideas turn towards violent revolution. This episode covers the 15 years of chaos, civil war and survival that forged the great Helmsman. Once again we are joined by the brilliant runner, Mitter leading expert on China. His books include Forgotten Allied, China's World War 2 and modern China a very short introduction. So let's pick up now from 1920. Officially China's a modern Republic but in reality what does it feel like to live in this new Republic? In reality Anita living in the early Chinese Republic is a period of immense uncertainty and unpredictability, possibility punctuated by violence. What do I mean by that? On the one hand if you were younger, if you were in a reasonably educated, not necessarily a high level intellectual but some of some level of education and if you were urban then a whole variety of possibilities opened up for you in the Republic that simply wouldn't have existed before. One example, the possibility for young men and women to meet in urban spaces and undertake what was then as a law-manty-cor relationship as a romantic because of course this would not have been in that form, something that young men and women could have done actually. At least because of course the generation earlier those women would have had been wandering around in parks or getting jobs as schoolteachers. So possibilities were there and yet the reality was that the hope that the Republic would be a constitutional Republic with regular general elections and political parties and all the kind of accoutrements of a modernised state really fell apart in the reality of constant violence from militarist leaders within China. Essentially late 19th century had seen China in practice split up between areas that were controlled by different militarist leaders, often nicknamed warlords and although China had an official government which was based in Beijing, in practice it was often the collection of warlords who could exercise their private armies to get control not just at the capital city but all served the income flow that came from controlling the customs service that provided a lot of income that actually decided who would rule in China. So a very precarious time which again patriots and nationalists of the time tends to feel was symbolic of a revolution that was not completed that hadn't got well and which China's younger generation would have to resolve one way or another. We're coming at this in retrospect and we know that the communists are about to do extraordinary things but is there any sign of this in 1921? What's the size of the communist party? Is it leaping into prominence or not? Absolutely not. This is basically a group of students, mostly men, who are sitting around in little study societies in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere. Yes, there are small cells in the sense of kind of small groupings of communist that emerged not just in Beijing or even Shanghai, the other major city of the era but in land as well. We now know that there were sort of communist meeting groups that would talk about Marx's theory at that time but many of them were drawing much more on a very intellectual understanding that came from reading Russian anarchists, really accounts for what happened in Russia in 1917. These weren't revolutionaries in the sense that we understand that term that day that took motivation and organization which came from elsewhere. They're sitting around there reading communist thoughts and having very clever, very wearing coffee sipping the equivalent of chat about political theory. Not the equivalent of one of the marks of modernity for a young student at that time. In fact, there's got a lot of writing about it was drinking coffee which actually a lot of young Chinese didn't really like tasted bitter and black and unfamiliar. Instead of drinking tea which would have been much more natural but by drinking something that didn't taste great but made you look cool, you were certainly tipping the hat towards modernity. So actually, yeah, literally coffee. I just stumbled upon a true thing but I wonder whether this must have been music to the Soviet Union because you also have a Soviet union that's flexing like crazy. Only three, four years after a revolution. Yeah, slightly BAM part and nobody's really in charge and you've got you know, sort of this little cadre of, okay, chatty revolutionaries who are sitting around talking about it. That is fertile ground. Is it not for the Soviet Union to they not get involved? Are they not trying help? Are they not trying to seed the ground a bit more? You say was it music to the Soviet Union? It was Shostakovich, it was Prokofiev and it was even Kalinikov, it was the full gamut. One of the things that is notable about the Soviet revolution is that it doesn't just operate at home. It also gets international very quickly through an institution called Common Turn. In other words, the Communist International whose job it is to go and ferment revolution overseas and China is indeed seen as a prime spot for that sort of revolution in development. Now, this isn't the University held view at the time because classic Marxist Leninist view was that you had to have an urban proletariat to get a proper revolution going. The Germany was always thought to be the place that would happen and so there was like surprise that Russia had actually come through. But if you're going to go to a place that has an urban proletariat, China is not really the place you would choose. I mean, yes, there are some factories in around Shanghai and elsewhere, but it's not a place that has what Marx would have thought of as a proletarian presence. Nonetheless, it definitely has large amounts of very unhappy, economically deprived people. Many of them in the countryside and well, Mao would come to be associated with the idea of rural revolution. I'm going to say much more about that. It's worth remembering as with many things to do with Mao, what he was retrospectively credited with inventing or developing and which he had a genuinely important role in. He didn't think of from first principles figures like a man called Pung Pai, who's probably quite forgotten, was one of the first instigators of rural revolutionary identity. But the common turn, the Soviet Union, could see an opportunity even with these sort of indigenous revolutionary movements to kind of organize, rationalize and mobilize them. And so they send in a variety of people over the years as people like Borodin, MN Roy, it's actually Indian and others, who come into essentially trying whip the revolution into shape. And in a cup of the chase, there make a few key decisions that end up being absolutely instrumental to what we now know was the ultimate success of the communist revolution, but was by no means obvious at the time. So number one was that the communist party was not jump in jiving and thriving at that time was very small and mostly based on a couple of cities and had zero kind of capacity or power whatsoever. So what these of advisors said was that they had to hook up with another revolutionary movement that would be more successful. And this is what some called the bourgeois revolution movement of the nationalist party, the Guamidang, sometimes written as Quomintang, then under leadership of Sun Yat Sen. At this moment, Sun Yat Sen is important because he is briefly president of China after the revolution when the emperor is overthrown. And then he lasts a few weeks really on the throne, a nationalist rather than a communist. Yes, a nationalist and a socialist, not a national socialist, I hasten to how he did not have Nazi tendencies, but someone who believed in more sort of collective economic models, he called it Min Shung, which is used to translate to sort of people's prosperity, but not a communist. But certainly on the left in a broad sense, it's fair to say an interested in support from the Soviet Union, he tried with this revolution. And then he went to all he'd been kicked off the presidential chair, but some people still thought of it as a kind of new type of, type of, you know, imperial presence and took his revolution movement down south to the area in Guangdong province around Canton, Guangzhou to try and get back into power. He didn't show much signs of being very successful at doing that and was looking around for Western support and getting Western support. And then the Soviets come along in 1921, 22, 23 and say, we will help you launch a revolution. And part of the terms and conditions when Sun accepted was that they should bring the fledgling communist party into the nationalist embrace because the nationalist party had been kicked out of power, rather than saying I said I'd been kicked out of power, but the nationalist party was still much broader based and much more successful than the tiny communists. And basically they form under Soviet influence in 1923, the first United Front. So this is a big moment because essentially it's the agreement to the Soviets that they will help both the nationalists and the communists. The nationalists will launch a bourgeois revolution, but like in Russia 1905 and somehow take over the country. And then the implication, although you know this wasn't stated, was that the communists would then come from within a launch, a Bolshevik style revolution somewhat later. And they cook up much of the stuff in a place that again becomes legendary, still famous even today, the Huangpu Academy, one power as it's sometimes known in its English transliteration. We're basically political training and revolution and military training trained by top Soviet advisors come together not only to teach people about why their revolutionaries, but also train them in military tactics so they can undertake that successful military uprising, which had so eluded them. Up to this point, so I mean are we talking about you know not just inspirational talks, but actual money and arms actual money and arms basically the common turn is there to ferment revolution, the whole rally places around the around the world. And they're perfectly aware that without proper training and supply of armaments and also of cash, this isn't going to happen, but it's used in sort of fairly judicious ways, you know the nationalist party is also able to draw on resources in China as it takes a lot of time. And they also look to form alliances of convenience with local military leaders, so you know someone who would later be condemned as a warlord, a man named Cheng Zhongming is basically their host in Guangdong province and in the end they fall out of the spectacularly with him, but his army and his resources are also part of the mix. In other words, the Soviets are important, but they're not the only source of funding and support for the revolution as it comes together. Ronald, what's really interesting in this period and why I'm slightly becoming obsessed with it is that you know the common turn are not just looking towards China, they're looking at other countries of India, like massively getting involved in Indian politics, because they are basically treating anybody with a grudge against the old order likes to wind up soldiers winding them up, training them, arming them, giving them rubles galore and then sending them off into the world create chaos. Yes, that's right. I mean essentially the common turn is the expression of something that's very central to the Bolshevik Revolutionary Movement, which is that it should not be simply something that happened to take place in Russia, but rather the beginning of a real shift from the world of nation states, which ended up, of course, ultimately going to war with each other in the Great War, World War One, and instead the shift to class struggle, the idea that in fact it's class and not nations on which the future of the world will be deposited. And as we now know, nation states proved a lot more difficult to erase than the common turn might have thought, but certainly this period the 1920s is a very fluid one in which these ideas are still of course immensely new, you know, they're only been tried out in one place and we don't yet of course know what we now know that the Cold War would see large parts of the world placed under the control of different communist parties. So at this point that aspiration combined of course with the really strong rise of anti-imperialist feeling in large numbers of Asian and African countries come together in a way that is for the revolutionaries obviously very inspiring and also really disruptive in terms of the global politics at that time. Rana, you were saying earlier how the communist including the Russians expected the urban predatory to be the vehicle of destiny, yes. But what you see in 1920s China is more peasant uprisings, isn't it? Broadly speaking, yes, I mean there is an attempt actually not entirely unsuccessful to try and organize in the in the cities, but a large part of what happens is out in the countryside and these two sides matter because what happens while there's this United Front that forms an ideology. That forms in the 23 the Soviet basically bringing together the nationalists and the communist the government and the CCP is that the CCP do get to organize trade unions and workers in the cities particularly in Shanghai, canton, control and other cities where there are significant numbers of factory workers not obviously the kind of level that you get in Britain or Germany but significant. At the same time there is also the development of areas of strong communist presence in the countryside as well for instance in places like Jinggangshan, out in the wilds of Jiangxi province which is kind of in the south central or central China and very very rural indeed both of these strands were part of the strategy but the difficulty comes in 1927 when there's a violent split between the communists and the nationalists. Sun Yatsen died in 1925 from cancer and his eventual successor, Chang Kai-shek, would essentially become the supreme leader of China from the period from the late 1920s all the way through to WWII and beyond. Unlike Sun Yatsen was extremely suspicious of the Soviets and communist influence so he ended up purging the communists. He had been to the top union, yes exactly he had visited it and being sort of rather disillusioned by what he found there so although it wasn't clear at the time he'd been nurturing the desire to essentially clean the communists out of the movement probably really in the period around and after Sun's death in 1920, 25 and then basically in 1927 when two purges first in Shanghai then in Canton see the destruction of the shooting down and killing of thousands of young communists. They have to retreat to the countryside because the city is no longer safe for them so it wasn't that they weren't able to organize the cities but the very abrupt ending of the first United Front in 1927 meant that those rural fastnesses were the place where the movement developed next. And the violence of these times becomes something that is imbibed by Mao he sort of writes this essay at the time where he says a revolution is not like inviting people to dinner or writing an essay or painting a picture or doing embroidery a revolution is an uprising and act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another it was necessary to overthrow completely the authority of the gentry to knock them down and even stump them underfoot. I mean it's the first time that he is using such violent language about the transformation of his country. It's certainly one of the turning point moments and it's the inspection of the present revolution the present movement in Huanan province again you know keep coming back to that that inspires him to write these these words but one of the things that is very associated with is doing that kind of on the ground very index examination of what conditions are like in the rural areas. Now I think it's fair to say that some of this is analysis of what he thinks is needed and some of it is essentially giving into his own preferences because it is actually if you look at the color wider spread of things not the case that the whole of rural China was in a sort of state of revolutionary ferment waiting to be overturned certainly there were significant inequalities in many parts of China but there were also large parts with the economy was actually doing better and we're also the links between family lineages and again the sort of sort of sort of. Family links would actually prevent that balance structure of one group by another and happening in quite so simple way so yes he spots these real disparities and the the poverty that you see in rural China but already at the stage he's beginning to impose some of the Marxist ideas that he's learned onto a countryside where Marxist analysis has some value but is much more complex than he's willing to allow take us back to the world. Take us back to Chiang Kai's check for a second run of his such important figure at this period paint us a portrait of him when I think of it my think of the sort of figure with gold braid and some wonderful sort of medals everywhere and you know holding a sword. Shanko shake one of the things that is worth remembering was centrally about him I think because he ends up being a foil particularly in mouse writings and mouse discussions of why the communist revolution eventually does succeed in taking over China. And so can't shake his portrayed for in many cases for very good reason as reactionary right wing conservative backward you know all these sorts of things and there are reasons to say that much of that has validity but that's not where he started out you know if he wanted to be all those things he would not have chosen to join the nationalist revolution as a young man in the 1910s and 1920s so he's a near contemporary of now he's a little older a few years older actually they would end up dying within the year of each other 1975 for China and 76. For for mal but he also is inspired by many of the same things that mal was he believed that China had become a very weak country at the mercy of imperial powers in like military discipline you want one better than malice and that he went to military academy in Japan because although he hated what Japan had done in terms of you know invading an occupying Taiwan for instance in 1895 he understood that the military. Discipline and the modernization that modern Japan had managed to undertake during the major restoration of the year 1860s was a recipe that China could learn from he believed that China should be modern that it should be rational should be bureaucratic and it should be run not by a liberal democracy but certainly by an authoritarian state in which modernity and rationality and militarism should basic dominate so in many of those things he was not a million miles away from me. Now when they both Puritan run out Changa shek I think really was a Puritan he was a Methodist amongst other things although he was a confusion by training he freak out your first to Christ and Jesus and Christianity in the pages of his diary he could have written anything he wanted he chose to write that so actually people say you know as China actually had a Christian leader Changa shek is quite a good answer to that but yes he lived in all still lifestyle even though he allowed in the end massive corruption to flow around. In terms of Mao he was certainly very keen on discipline we'd mentioned before his interest in personal exercise but he ate and drank pretty indulgently so very different figures personally different and the same they were both products of the you know destruction of the old order that came the late Qingda's the other born and brought up during that period of huge turmoil and turbulence they both became nationalists who believe that the solution was to turn China into a world of war. They were strong nation state they were both ideological Changa shek's nationalism was very much driven by the idea of you know authoritarianism but also the idea of you know social welfare of a sort which he got from Sun Yatsen he was rather vague about how to achieve it. Mao obviously believed in radical revolution to bring about a new form of welfare but they they both believed in social change as part of what they put together in the end yes personality wise Chang was cautious more taciturn more withdrawn. But as one of his accolades put it he loves to make decisions well Mao was well Mao love to make decisions on which worked out better than others but he was mercurial witty kind of gratuitously cruel in a way that. Changa shek was cruel frequent but you might say it was sort of business for Mao is business and pleasure they had really quite different sorts of personality that way join us after the break as we're going to talk about these two men a bit more and what happens as a result of having these two incredibly. Powerful personalities at the helm of what might be the birth of a new China. 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Network prices require letter account terms at sayings breeze dot code or UK slash L.D. Price match and net to dot com slash prices terms. Welcome back now just before the break rather we were talking about the similarities and the differences between these two men is it's not also one fundamental difference is that. Changa shek is actually a little bit or quite a lot of it in fact dubious about the Soviet interest that's absolutely right one profound. Area of difference between Mao and tanka shek was the tanka shek very quickly became dissolution with the idea that the Soviet Union. Could be the solution to China's problems in any sense and Mao ended up along with the rest of the party of course very very closely allied to Soviet interest it's worth. It's worth it because at this point Mao is a. Promons the significant figure in the party but he is not the leader whereas Changa shek in 97 you know he establishes himself as the leader of the national party out of interest is that acknowledged in China or is it implied that he is the leader already in Chinese historiography. The moment at which he's generally regarded as having become the leader I think in China if you took the majority of sort of official views would be the zunyi conference which takes place during the long March which we will we will get to so technically speaking I think he doesn't actually become formally general set to the party on a settle 1945. It takes a from Zhang Wenqian who is probably not a well known but is actually technically the leader of the party at that point but it's partly because of the way in which leadership authority leadership positions don't always match with the other in that era well come to the long March in a little while but you know we're right now we're in the 1920s mid 1920s and you've got this uneasy marriage between the communist and the nationalists you know between people who are either very enamored with all suspicious of what you know. The Soviets are up to but they do unite in this uneasy marriage with this one mission that they are going to sort out the regional warlords once and for all you know these guys who are doing everything they want for their own interest they've got to be put down and you have this episode in April 1927 called the white terror tell us a bit more about what this is. So this is the end point of a campaign that is this year it's 100th anniversary so many people may not be looking back to 1926 as the start of the northern expedition it's basically a military campaign in which the united front of the nationalists under Zhang Ka Shek the communists with various leaders but now is in the mix and of course the support of the Soviet Union come together starting from southern China from Guangdong to move north to essentially take over the government. Of the country and although it's a slow and not always linear progression mainly up the east coast of China by 1927 they have broadly speaking managed to either fight bribe could you all or coerce other militarist leaders within China in many parts of of eastern China anyway to unite under one government which is essentially under Zhang Ka Shek's control formally it happened 1928 with the establishment of a new nationalist government the gongi down government to be. China which actually moves the capital from Beijing to Nanjing or Nanjing as it was known in the west at that time the reason being that Nanjing is right in the heartland of Changka Shex area of control it's also actually that region is his birthplace was born in shiko in Jodang province in central China Beijing was too far north it was sort of in the essentially area of other warlords control and so wouldn't have been politically useful but that's the point where Changka Shex was been nurturing an increasing suspicion. So the Soviets only want to encourage his revolution in all the expedition which unites China so they can their launch a Bolshevik revolution of their own which the communist will take over and he strikes first that's why there is this vicious violent turning on communist in Shanghai and then can't on in Guangzhou what form does that take are the knocks on the door in the middle of the night in this sort of thing or how does it yeah are they killing people are arresting them or what are they doing yeah there's knocks on the doors but you know it's much more brutal than that even they just run out of the way they are. So how does the black sand river go round up people and we're talking about young revolutionaries in their 20s baby from their teens young idealistic they join the communist party suddenly they're rounded up and gone down in the streets all their tired together their bodies are thrown into the river they're kinda floating down the Huangpu. It's made very clear this is a violent coup against people who until you know 5 minutes before have been coalition partners. It is worth saying, just as a matter of, you know, objective historical analysis, that Chang'a-Shek was probably not wrong, that the purpose of the common turn was to ferment a violent Bolshevik revolution in China off the back of a bourgeois revolution. But the fact is that the people who ended up paying for this were mostly the young and often, you know, extremely sort of wet behind the ears, revolutionaries who were part of that insurgent force and not the kind of grizzled old commanders who must be managed to escape. Do we know how many died? I mean, how many were killed in this purge? We do have exact figures partly because they, you know, for all this reasons, didn't necessarily keep a huge tally, but we certainly talk about thousands of people at that time. I mean, to explain one of the things that happened and one of the reasons why it's hard to get numbers, one particularly important figure in Chang'ai, rounding up, arresting, killing, large numbers of communists, was a man who went by the attractor name of Big Year's Duh, Yusheng, who was the leader of the Qingbang, the Green Gang, the biggest mafia in Chang'ai at that time. Big Year's has very much sort of Chicago slang from sort of al-Kapoo-Diara, yeah. You know, he and his gang and the nationalist party or the part of the Chanko Shaken, his military wing, were very much in kuhuts at that time. And quite often it would be the Mafiosi, not the commission soldiers who would actually be rounding up and killing his students and young communist fighters, which is one of the reasons again. The Mafia do a lot of things, but they don't tend to keep numbers, or at least not in the open. I'm only quite impressed by Big Year's ears, Rada, have you looked it up? I mean, they're not naughty proportion, Big Year's Rada, I have to say. And what I can say is that if you would have been felt bold enough in, say, 1927 to go up to Duyer Sheng, the leader of the most vicious and violent gang in the whole of Chang'ai and control of half the city and say, actually, your ears aren't really as big as I thought they would be. It's wrong, it's wrong, it's not that I'm so violent. I mean, to please be my guest. We haven't heard what happened to Mao in the middle of it. Yes, how does he survive his? By this stage, the communist movement has split into two broad strands, one of which is the urban strand, which involves many of the people who are rounded up and killed, and then a rural strand. Now, one of the things that distinguishes Mao and what he becomes famous for is the idea of rural revolution. So he's never a revolution the city guys in some ways. He is very much someone who believes that it's the peasantry who are going to be whether revolution is unleashed. A fish in the water, whatever the phrase is. Exactly. Party members should be fish. He's swimming the water of the people, something along those lines and possibly get hooked out by various people with fishing rods, but we'll come to that. The rural areas, which are often very, very hard scrap, very, very impoverished, become the center for the rural part of the revolution. And Mao becomes particularly embedded in a base area that's set up in Jiangxi province in East South Central China. And is that partly because he's from that background and is considered someone who's good with peasants and he sounds like he's a peasant or how does he end up being there? It's, there are a whole variety of factional kind of disputes within the party at that time. Having a Mao is not at this point, the Mao who will become the supreme leader that we know of during his period in power. That Mao, finger in the wind, but I'd say doesn't really emerge until the mid 1940s at the earliest. At this point, you have to think of the party. It's still relatively small. It's been viciously bastard by the coup against it in the cities by Chankha Shai in 1927. So the countryside and the people who've been based out there from being one part of a division between rural and urban now become really the kind of the whole in a sense. And they are consumed with a very different set of questions and those are questions on which yes, Mao is more expert. So let me give a specific example of what we think of in terms of the peasantry. There's a wonderfully interesting analysis of one particular county, a place called Shinhua, written by Mao. It's one of those early writings, the states from early 1930. It's been translated into English under the title report from Shinhua, XUNWU by the historian Roger Thompson, his other fabulous translation commentary up there. So it's a wonderful thing to read because it's probably the single longest and most relevant early reading by Mao, not about ideology, revolution or even butttrusts in his personal exercise plan, which we dealt with in a previous episode briefly. But actually the thing he becomes best known for as a political analyst, which is what the countryside's really like and how it works. And considering how hide bound, how kind of stylized, how destructive his model of class war became in later decades. Reading report from Shinhua's fascinating, it's about someone who is observing what he actually sees rather than trying to fit it into ideological categories. And it has everything about who goes to the market, which women are allowed to house and which aren't. And there's a character who is not particularly beloved local, frail or immersion. He's famous translated as Uncle Shitcrock, which is not I think a term of affection. It also actually marks the beginning of what in his life would be a very long list of scatter logical references, which rather distinguish Mao's writing about his world. It's such a weird combination of Marx's theory and obsession with toilets. So he at one point some years later says, the condition of the peasantry, which is not yet fully brought into proletarian consciousness, is like a man who is squatting down and trying to shit, but unable to actually get the shit out. And it is only when it has made its way through the digestive system that you will get full fulfillment from your laboratory activity and that the peasantry, I guess, will be fully proletarianized. This again is another improbable link with Gandhi, who's also obsessed with the theory of life. He talked about his own, but he didn't like his sort of revolution to basically pooping in a field. Have you never been to the Gandhi and toilet museum in Delhi, which is a very important part of us? There's sort of a half I have, I know about his toilets, back to Mao though. Back to the country side. Anyway, Uncle Shitcrock's doing his stuff in Shenwu, but the point is that it's a very detailed sociological account essentially of everything that's happening at a very granular level. A level of serious detailed political investigation that Mao was doing as part of building up his view of what revolution should be. But we also get at this time a little glimpse into the Mao the future as well, because you know, they're having the nationalist press down upon them, you know, sort of wiping out thousands of their followers in the cities. And in response, what Mao decides to do is get really paranoid and say, you know what, at this time of great adversity, I'm going to kill some of my comrades because I don't think that they are trustworthy. And you have this enormous bloodletting. Absolutely. Yes. Belieger revolutionary clique descends into paranoia and murderous anarchy who would have done it. You know, it wasn't the first time, it wouldn't be the last time either, not just in China, but you know, you can think of any other examples. Yes, you're absolutely right. I mean, what you mentioned was called the Futeon Incident, and you know, it's not the only one. Essentially, different members of the party leadership in out in Jiangxi province, this very rural area are paranoid about each other. Are they going down spies? Are they, you know, being influenced by foreigners? Whatever it might be, some reason to think that if you don't get them, they will get you. And of course, once you start thinking that you must kill your, you know, your comrades before they kill you, the paranoia, just because their paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you to use the old phrase. Right. This is one of the things that he's not talked about in China because for two reasons. One is that the idea that, you know, this sort of founder of the Chinese Revolution engaged, as you say, in a kind of huge competitive bloodletting at this point isn't, you know, great for the image. And second, I'm probably even more important in the sense, there's absolutely no evidence that any of these things were true that, you know, they were all secretly going down spies, whatever it might be. It was genuine paranoia in the sense it was not, it seems based on reality. There was a point to be, to be bending over backwards to be mildly fair here. There is an occasion, I think in 1930, when one of the party papers, Communist Party newspapers, that's not controlled by Mao, his obituary turns up in it. And since, you know, Mao was still very much alive at that time. If you picked up the paper and found your obituary had been printed, you might also feel a little antsy. Grumpy. No, suspicious. Yeah. At least at the very least what the, what the editor of the party newspaper had admired for you. So yes, but, but, but essentially as a sort of factor contributing to the downfall of the communist in Yangxi, the kind of massively violent bloodletting was certainly part of it. But, Rana, everyone's at it. I mean, that's the thing that's really astonishing. So true, so true. Because you've also got, you know, the nationalist doing this. So it hits really close to Mao's own home, a nationalist warlord in 1930 about the same sort of time, captures Mao's sister and then gives her this choice publicly denounce your brother, dissolve your marriage or die. And she says, okay, I'll die then. And she's executed. I mean, she's, she's, so this denouncing thing is that what, is this new to Chinese politics or is this a thing that has always been there that you must be humiliated denounce and then be tortured and die? It's certainly the case that the Chinese imperial court, at least, you know, over the dynasties when things were getting, you know, heated, were places of real intrigue. And there, people not just be denouncing each other to basically kind of destroy rival factions and get to the emperor's zero and get to power, but, you know, would literally, you know, have family members of rival factions, you know, captured and murdered and sliced up and, you know, but their parts of their bodies placed in vessels full of liquid. So it could be pretty, pretty hardcore stuff. I would say that the trend that emerges in the Communist Party is partly drawn from that sort of, you know, understanding of power being zero sum, which I think, you know, in some ways was very much part of the non-confucian side of Chinese imperial culture. The Confucian side was more about kind of harmony and living together and so forth, but the other side was purely vicious. But it is also a modern phenomenon. And you say where does it come from? In part, it comes from Soviet influence. This is by now the time of Stalin, you know, Lenin who wasn't exactly a kind of shrinking violent and also actually wrote extensively on the need for terror as part of his theory of democratic centralism, gives way to or dies and, you know, Stalin takes over and Stalin's paranoia certainly infiltrates the common turn and elsewhere in terms of wanting to make sure there are no alternative centers of power that could possibly topple him, but the same sort of feeling also influences many of the Chinese Communists. The difference being that Stalin by then at least in his own terms is pretty solidly in power in the Soviet Union. Whereas the Chinese Communists are nowhere near power, they will be a bit of junky province, but they're not fully in control there. And they're on the run because the nationalists are undertaking, and again, this is part of the recent paranoia during much of the early 1930s, the campaign to surround by the nationalists, to surround and destroy the Communists in junky is literally called the extermination campaign. So if you know that your major political opponent has got a whole bunch of soldiers coming on something called the extermination campaign, that's what I meant you a little bit, chap, I think you're four or five of them actually in the end, so it's not just a one off. Ronald, do you have any impression at this period that Mao is any more ruthless than any of his colleagues than any more fearsome and violent? I would say that Mao is necessarily the kind of most violent of these, but certainly he was very happy to play in that particular pool. But he's an amass. I mean, you know, by 1934, you know, the nationalists have caught up with him, and they've, as you say, they've got this extermination plan. Who is in the name? I mean, yeah, it does what it says on the tin. So the way they do this is that they encircle Mao here in the countryside. You've got Mao and all his followers are facing complete annihilation. And this is when they develop what is written in China these days as this fantastic strategy that they outmaneuver a superior force that has encircled them. And it's known as the Long March. Now in the mythology, they take everything that's not nailed down and they march out and they completely foil this, you know, this cordon that's around them and they get out and they save themselves taking printing machines, X-ray machines. I mean, if you're carrying that much stuff, it's not so much a march as a crawl, but they do manage to get out, but not without cost. I mean, the Long March is a hideous, terrible thing for the people who are on it. Long March is a defeat. There is no question about it. How do you say become a legendary event? How interesting is that the reality? Well, yes, because I mean, if you were kind of running your little Soviet airing, Jansi province and everything was going fine, you weren't kind of murdering your comrades, then you wouldn't suddenly have the need to go on a massive expedition that involved traveling through backcountry over thousands and thousands of miles. You're running away. Yeah, running away, losing 90% of your personnel on the way. There's a reason that Long March veterans, people who made it all the way to one of the end points, are considered to be essentially communist royalty, in that they were the true believers who really, really insisted on going to the end when, as I say, nine out of ten people either killed or basically decided that, you know, sod this for a laugh and disappeared off elsewhere. It became inevitable because the nationalist assault on the Jansi Soviet became too difficult to resist. They used new tactics called block houses, which basically blockaded the area, but also and this is significant in terms of what Mao learns. A lot of locals have begun to turn against them. Initially, the Jansi Soviet hadn't been particularly communist for a lot of a better word, you know, they brought in local warlords and basically said, oh, you're part of the communist army now. And they're like, okay, fine, but they kind of could carry on raiding and doing their stuff and they weren't that bothered. By the time you get to the period when they're beginning to try and sort of eliminate some of these military leaders and also, you know, reorient land holdings and so forth, or, you know, property and so forth amongst the locals, lots of locals are not very keen on this at all. And there's a strong feeling that the communists are no longer welcome. So they're also feeling cold shoulder in their own territory by that phase. So for all these reasons, but primarily because the nationalist military is finally getting exactly together and looks like it's going to keep them out, they have to launch this serious exhibition. Remember the Long March is not just one March as well. There are different columns that go in slightly different routes. And even at the end point, there's not one single endpoint either. And the numbers, rather, we're talking about what 80,000 people and there's air raids, they're being chased all the way. So this starts in autumn of 1934 that the sort of big march of troops retreating from Jansi begins. And it's more than a year before they get to their eventually end pointing Shanshi province and the northwest of China where they're finally able to set up a new set of bases, largely in the city of Bahrain but elsewhere. It starts off from what we know in a fairly ordered way. You know, this is a huge group of people. And technically, it's now one of the first fronts of the Red Army. This is a term that you can start to use at that point because after 1927, when the sudden fissious slaughtering of large numbers of communist members, they decided they should never be dependent again on the military of another organization, meaning the nationalists in this case. And so they essentially start to set up the institution that became the Red Army and the uprisings of the peasant uprisings, the countryside in Jansi and elsewhere that are regarded as sort of the start point, the birthplace of what is actually today's People's Liberation Army, a very, very different organization, a huge, massive, technologically enabled one. But it traces the history back to the 1927, 1930s in that Jansi period. So this is a significant army that's setting out on a long march by 1934. It's not just sort of a wrackle tackle. But and of course, they have Soviet advisors and other people on the way as well. And the Soviets are on board at this point. They've abandoned the nationalists. They're very much supporting the CCP. They are. Well, it's not so much that they've abandoned the nationalists. Well, the nationalists have abandoned them. Shankash makes it very clear that he has no intention of allowing Soviet influence to continue. I want a picture of the long march run. So that the people are marching in rank and file down a whole series of roads in uniform. I mean, that they're driving cattle with them. What's the nature of it? The rare raids? What's going on? You know, large numbers of people in formation, these train troops now, they've had that Soviet influence. I mean, again, much of the countryside into which they're having to go is fairly hard scrabble. There's also different columns that emerge at different times. Some of the senior leaders and other figures have been carried at various points. They're not necessarily literally all walking, but they don't have in a military transportation or vehicles. The vast majority of what is being done is genuine, you know, walking marching. They give a whack. They camp, obviously, you know, particularly in the initial fear when you've got that many people, you have to have camp cooks and people who are providing, you know, a kitchen equipment. I mean, cooks for 80,000 people is no small feat of organization. No, small feat? No, no, absolutely. It's probably one of the reasons why they start to lose people after a while because keeping them supplied was a big deal. It's not like they necessarily have canteens or supply lines coming in from somewhere to restock them. Are they marching animals with them? Are there kinds of lines of pigs and sheep following them along the roads? I don't think they're business sheep, although I'd be corrected on that. Horses certainly in some cases, but what happens is that they're having to negotiate, I would negotiate in various areas to get hold of sufficient food. Or in some cases, I think, pretty sure that they're raiding essentially. Part of the message is supposed to be that the communists are different from the nationalists. They don't just go in and steal from the people. But at the same time, there's often a thin line between not stealing and, say, coercing the sale of foodstuffs and other products, particularly if the currency you're using isn't necessarily easily exchangeable. So I think this grouping, turning up in a village and suggesting that it would be a very good idea if everyone got fed, was probably a limitation that few peasants could say no to. During this period, air power is now a very important part of warfare. There are massive air raids on these columns, and among those who get badly injured is Mao's wife, who has a very bad time of it. Yes, Khadzijun is injured by a passing plane. It's fair to say that, well, there is a bit of use of air power at the stage. This is not still something that's commonplace in China. The nationalists have a very small air force, a very good air force to be honest at that point. Even if it didn't have very often, it would be quite terrifying, I think, for people who are on the march at that time. Or for, yeah, and for Mao's wife, particularly, or for, because, as Willie says, not only does she get hurt, but she also is forced to give birth to her daughter in a straw hut during the march. And because it's so hard to take children with you to feed them to know where the next meal is going to come from, this couple is forced to give up their child to a local peasant family along the route. And they never see her again. Children almost certainly actually were mostly left behind. That's one of the things you find printed stories of people who have small children who are essentially given away to village families is very tragic because they couldn't be maintained on a march like that. So this is, as you say, it's painted as this great heroic episode in Communist China. But actually, it, you know, beleaguered, destroyed people and, you know, the lucky survivors end up somewhere alive. Where does Mao end up? And now how do we mark the end of the long march? Two things just to say in terms of long march significance briefly, but I think importantly, the first is that there is one moment that happens within the march in 1935 at a place called Sunyi, a part way along the march. And this is generally seen by the Communist today as the sort of trigger point for Mao's rise to leadership because there's basically a conference in which the Soviets and the Communist, Chinese Communist accused each other of, you know, where did all go wrong? How come we're kind of on the run here? We thought it was all going great and it didn't. And Mao's voice in that was, in retrospect, it's been made the most important one. Actually, it probably wasn't, but it was an important moment in terms of his rise to power. So the long march goes on and then, you know, more than a year after they've set out from Jiangxi, different divisions of the Red Army end up in different places. The central and most important immediate place, a place called Ba'an in Shanxi Province in Northwest China. And that's where it becomes important because Mao and other people round him, make a base there. And then a while later, moved to a place which becomes much more legendary called Yanan, which actually becomes the real Communist capital, you might say, from the mid-1930s all the way until actually the Civil War in the late 1940s. So the long march ends in several places, relatively close to each other. So by 1935, Rama, the march has reached its conclusion that's been massive bloodshed, but it's been good for Mao. Mao has risen in the ranks, and many of his rivals perhaps have been moved. Yes. From being, you know, a prominent but in some ways controversial member of the Communist leadership, I mean, he always was one of those. And of course, a founder member of the party in his own right back in 1921, as the long march comes to an end, as the party settles in in Ba'an, then later moves on to Yanan, Mao is at the cusp of the set of military, ideological, and in many cases, very personal choices that will bring him in time to supreme power within the party. Just remember, this is at the same time that Imperial Japan has got its arm, right on China, and is about to unleash one of the most violent occupations in its history. And in that next episode that we will bring to you, we're going to see how Mao rising up through the ranks is going to deal with the Japanese and the communists as he rises to that position that, you know, we now know him as the chairman. And Willi, if people want to hear the next episode, what do they do? If they want to hear the next episode with our wonderful guest, Rana, and indeed the rest of this series, then they need to join the MPa Club. I would recommend that you for go a pint next month, and instead for the same price, you can get early access free shows, a weekly newsletter, and book discounts, MPaPodUK.com. That's where you need to go this minute. Anyway, listen, that's all we've got time for. Thank you very much, Rana, and we will be speaking to you again. Till the next time we meet, though, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnum. And me, William Turboh.