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

18:50Rana Mitter:Chiang Kai-shek, one of the things that is worth remembering was centrally about him, I think, because he ends up being a foil, particularly in Mao's writings and Mao's discussions of why the communist revolution eventually does succeed in taking over China. And so Chiang Kai-shek is portrayed, 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'd 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.

19:26Rana Mitter:So he's a near contemporary of Mao. He's a little bit older, a few years older. Actually, they would end up dying within a year of each other, 1975 for Chiang and 1976 for Mao. But he also is inspired by many of the same things that Mao was. He believed that China had become a very weak country at the mercy of imperial powers. He lacked military discipline. He won one better than Mao in a sense in that he went to military academy in Japan, because although he hated what Japan had done in terms of, you know, invading and occupying Taiwan, for instance, in 1895, he understood that the military discipline and the modernization that modern Japan had managed to undertake during the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s was a recipe that China could learn from.

20:08Rana Mitter:He believed that China should be modern, that it should be rational, it 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 basically dominate. So in many of those things, he was not a million miles away from Mao. Were they both Puritans, Rana? Chiang Kai-shek, I think, really was a Puritan. He was a Methodist. Amongst other things, although he was a Confucian by training, he frequently refers to Christ and Jesus and Christianity in the pages of his diary. He could have written anything he wanted.

20:43Rana Mitter:He chose to write that. So actually, people say, you know, has China ever actually had a Christian leader? Chiang Kai-shek is quite a good answer to that. But yes, he lived an austere lifestyle, even though he allowed in the end massive corruption to flow around him during his period of rule. In terms of Mao, he was certainly very keen on discipline. We've mentioned before his interest in personal exercise, but he ate and drank pretty indulgently.

21:07William:So very different figures personally.

21:10Rana Mitter:Different and the same. They were both products of the, you know, destruction of the old order that came in the late Qingda's. They were both born and brought up during that period of huge turmoil and turbulence. They both became nationalists who believed that the solution was to turn China into a strong nation state. They were both ideological. Chiang Kai-shek's nationalism was very much driven by an idea of authoritarianism, but also the idea of social welfare of a sort, which he got from Sun Yat-sen. 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 both believed in social change as part of what they put together.

21:48Rana Mitter:In the end, yes, personality-wise, Chang was cautious, more taciturn, more withdrawn. But as one of his acolytes put it, he loved to make decisions. Well, Mao as well. Mao loved to make decisions, some of which worked out better than others. But he was mercurial, witty, kind of gratuitously cruel in a way that Chang Kai-shek was cruel frequently, but you might say it was sort of business. for Mao's business and pleasure. They had really quite different sorts of personality that way.

22:20Anita:Join us after the break because 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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24:04Anita:Welcome back. Now, just before the break, Rana, we were talking about the similarities and the differences between these two men. It's not also one fundamental difference. It's that Chiang Kai-shek is actually a little bit, or quite a lot of bit, in fact, dubious about the Soviet interest.

24:22Rana Mitter:That's absolutely right. One profound area of difference between Mao and Chiang Kai-shek was that Chiang Kai-shek very quickly became disillusioned 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 interests. It's worth noting, of course, at this point, Mao is a prominent and significant figure in the party, but he is not the leader. Whereas Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, you know, he establishes himself as the leader of the nationalist parties.

24:54William:Out of interest, is that acknowledged today in China or is it implied that he is the leader already in Chinese historiography?

25:00Rana Mitter:David 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 get to. So technically speaking, I think he doesn't actually become formally General Secretary of the party, I want to say until 1945. He takes over from Zhang Wantian, who is probably not a well-known name, but is actually technically the leader of the party at that point. But it's partly because of the way in which leadership authority and leadership positions don't always match with each other in that era.

25:34Anita:We'll 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 communists and the nationalists, you know, between people who are either very enamoured with or 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.

26:09Anita:Tell us a bit more about what this is.

26:12Rana Mitter: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 Chiang Kai-shek, the communists with various leaders, but Mao 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, cajole or coerce other militarist leaders within China, in many parts of eastern China anyway, to unite under one government, which is essentially under Chiang Kai-shek's control.

27:06Rana Mitter:Formerly, it happened in 1988 with the establishment of a new nationalist government, the Guomindan government of China, which actually moves the capital from Beijing to Nanjing, or Nanking, as it was known in the West at that time. The reason being that Nanjing is right in the heartland of Chiang Kai-shek's area of control. It's also actually that region is his birthplace. He was born in Xikou in Zhejiang province in East 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 Chiang Kai-shek, who has been nurturing an increasing suspicion that the Soviets only want to encourage his revolution, the Northern Expedition, which unites China, so they can then launch a Bolshevik revolution of their own in which the communists will take over.

27:51Rana Mitter:And he strikes first. That's why there is this vicious, violent turning on communists in Shanghai and then Canton in Guangzhou.

27:59William:What form does that take? Are there knocks on the door in the middle of the night and this sort of thing? Or how does it?

28:05Anita:Yeah, are they killing people or arresting them or what are they doing?

28:08Rana Mitter:Yeah, there's knocks on the doors, but it's much more brutal than that even. They just round up people. And we're talking about young revolutionaries in their 20s, maybe even in their teens, young, idealistic. They've joined the Communist Party. Suddenly they're rounded up and gunned down in the streets or they're tied together. Their bodies are thrown into the river. They're kind of floating down the Huangpu. It's made very clear that this is a violent coup against people who until five minutes before had been coalition partners. It is worth saying, just as a matter of, you know, objective historical analysis, that Chiang Kai-shek was probably not wrong, that the purpose of the Comintern was to ferment a violent Bolshevik revolution in China off the back of a bourgeois revolution.

28:50Rana Mitter: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 mostly managed to escape

29:04Anita:Do we know how many died? I mean, how many were killed in this purge?

29:08Rana Mitter:I don't think we have exact figures, partly because they, you know, for obvious reasons, didn't necessarily keep a huge tally. But we're certainly talking 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 Shanghai, rounding up, arresting, killing large numbers of communists, was a man who went by the attractive name of Big Ears Du, Du Yuesheng, who was the leader of the Qingbang, the Green Gang, the biggest mafia in Shanghai at that time.

29:38William:Biggest has very much sort of Chicago slang from sort of Al Capone era.

29:43Rana Mitter:You know, he and his gang and the Nationalist Party or the part under Chiang Kai-shek and his military wing were very much in cahoots at that time. And quite often it would be the mafiosi, not the commissioned soldiers, who would actually be rounding up and killing these 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.

30:07William:I'm only quite impressed by Big Ear's ears, Rana, having looked him up.

30:12Anita:I mean, they're not noddy proportion, Big Ear's, Rana, I have to say.

30:16Rana Mitter:Anita, what I can say is that if you would have felt bold enough in, say, 1927 to go up to Du Yersheng, the leader of the most vicious and violent gang in the whole of Shanghai and controller of half the city and say, actually, your ears aren't really as big as I thought they would be. Not as bad as I've heard. Please be my guest.

30:35William:We haven't heard what happened to Mao in the middle of it.

30:37Anita:Yes, how does he survive it?

30:39Rana Mitter: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 in the city guy in some ways. He is very much someone who believes that it's the peasantry who are going to be where the revolution is unleashed. A fish in the water, whatever the phrase is. Exactly. The party members should be fish who swim in the water of the people or something along those lines.

31:13Rana Mitter: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 hardscrabble, 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.

31:33William: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?

31:42Rana Mitter:There are a whole variety of factional kind of disputes within the party at that time. And bearing in mind, 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 battered by the coup against it in the cities by Chiang Kai-shek 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 whole, in a sense.

32:20Rana Mitter: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're thinking of in terms of the peasantry. There's a wonderfully interesting analysis of one particular county, a place called Xunwu, written by Mao. It's one of his early writings, dates from 1930. And it's been translated into English under the title, a report from Xunwu, X-U-N-W-W, by the historian Roger Thompson, who's done a fabulous translation and commentary of this. And 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 buttock thrusts in his personal exercise plan, which we dealt with in a previous episode briefly.

33:01Rana Mitter:But actually the thing he becomes best known for as a political analyst, which is what the countryside is really like and how it works. And considering how hidebound, how kind of stylized, and how destructive his model of class war became in later decades. Reading a report from Shunwu is fascinating because 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 out of the house and which aren't. And there's a character who is, I think, a sort of not particularly beloved local trade or a merchant whose name is translated as Uncle Shitcroc, which is not, I think, a term of affection.

33:44Rana Mitter:It also actually marks the beginning of what in his life would be a very long list of scatological references which rather distinguish Mao's writing about his world. It's such a weird combination of Marxist 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 fulfilment from your lavatorial activity and that the peasantry, I guess, will be fully proletarianised.

34:25William:This again is another improbable link with Gandhi, who's also obsessed with this area of life.

34:32Anita:Well, he talked about his own, but he didn't like his sort of revolution to basically pooping in a field.

34:37William:Have you never been to the Gandhian Toilet Museum in Delhi, which is a very important part?

34:42Anita:I have, I have, I know about his toilets. Back to Mao, though.

34:46Rana Mitter:Back to the countryside. Anyway, Uncle Shet Kroc's doing his stuff in Shinwa. But the point is that it's a very detailed sociological account, essentially, of everything that's happening at a very granular level. And it shows the level of serious, detailed political investigation that Mao was doing as part of building up his view of what revolution should be.

35:06Anita:But we also get at this time a little glimpse into the Mao of the future as well, because, you know, they're having the nationalists 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.

35:31Rana Mitter:Absolutely yes beleaguered revolutionary clique descends into paranoia and murderous anarchy who would have thunk it you know it wasn't the first time it wouldn't be the last time either not just in China but you You can think of plenty of other examples. Yes, you're absolutely right. I mean, what you mentioned was called the Futian incident, and it's not the only one. Essentially, different members of the party leadership out in Jiangxi province, this very rural area, are paranoid about each other. Are they Guomindang spies? Are they being influenced by foreigners? Whatever it might be, some reason to think that if you don't get them, they will get you.

36:10Rana Mitter:And of course, once you start thinking that you must kill your comrades before they kill you the paranoia to you know just because they're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you to use the old phrase 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 the image and second and probably even more important in a sense there's absolutely no evidence that any of these things were true that you know they were all secretly goblin going down spies, whatever it might be.

36:43Rana Mitter:It was genuine paranoia in the sense it was not, it seems, based on reality. There was a point, 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 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, or suspicious. At least at the very least what the editor of the party newspaper had in mind for you. So, yes, but essentially as a sort of factor contributing to the downfall of the communists in Jiangxi, the kind of massively violent bloodletting was certainly part of it.

37:26Anita:But Rana, everyone's at it. I mean, that's the thing that's really astonishing.

37:29Rana Mitter:So true, so true.

37:30Anita:Because you also got the nationalists 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, OK, I'll die then. And she's executed. I mean, so this denouncing thing, is this new to Chinese politics or is this a thing that has always been there that you must be humiliated, denounced and then be tortured and die?

38:04Rana Mitter:It's certainly the case that the Chinese imperial court, at least over the dynasties when things were getting heated, were places of real intrigue. And there, people would not just be denouncing each other to basically kind of destroy rival factions and get to the emperor's ear and get to power. But we literally have family members of rival factions captured and murdered and sliced up and 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 understanding of power being zero sum, which I think in some ways was very much part of the non-Confucian side of Chinese imperial culture.

38:51Rana Mitter: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 violet 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.

39:26Rana Mitter: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 rule bits of Jiangxi 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 Jiangxi is literally called the extermination campaign.

39:57Rana Mitter:So if you know that your major political opponent has got a whole bunch of soldiers coming on something called the extermination campaign that also might make you a little bit chubby i think there are four or five of them actually in the uh in the end so it's not just a one-off rana do you have any impression at

40:12William:this period that mao is any more ruthless than any of his colleagues and any more fearsome and violent

40:18Rana Mitter:i wouldn't say that mao was necessarily the the kind of most violent of these but certainly he He was very happy to play in that particular pool.

40:25Anita:But he's in a mess. I mean, you know, by 1934, you know, the nationalists have caught up with him. And as you say, they've got this extermination plan. Clue 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 cordon that's around them and they get out and they save themselves taking printing machines x-ray machines.

41:14Anita: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.

41:27Rana Mitter:The Long March is a defeat. There is no question about it. It has, as 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 area in Jiangxi 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.

41:50Anita:You're running away.

41:51Rana Mitter: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, you know, 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 10 people either were 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 Jiangxi Soviet became too difficult to resist. They used new tactics that were called block houses, which basically blockaded the area.

42:26Rana Mitter:But also, and this is significant in terms of what Mao learns, a lot of locals have begun to turn against them. Initially, the Jiangxi Soviet hadn't been particularly communist, for want of a better word. They'd brought in local warlords and basically said, oh, you're part of the communist army now. And they're like, oh, 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 reorient land holdings and so forth, or property and so forth amongst the locals, lots of locals are not very keen on this at all.

43:02Rana Mitter:And there's a strong feeling that the communists are no longer welcome. So they're also feeding the cold shoulder in their own territory by that phase. So for all these reasons, but primarily because the nationalist military is finally getting its act together and looks like it's going to keep them out, they have to launch this series of expeditions. 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 end point either.

43:27William:And the numbers run. And we're talking about, what, 80 ,000 people and there's air raids, they're being chased all the way.

43:33Rana Mitter:So this starts in autumn of 1934, that the sort of big march of troops retreating from Jiangxi begins. And it's more than a year before they get to their eventual endpoint in Shanxi province in the northwest of China, where they're finally able to set up a new set of bases, largely the city of Baon, 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 vicious, you know, 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.

44:16Rana Mitter: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 Jiangxi 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 sort of organisation, huge, massive, technologically enabled one. But it traces history back to the 1920s and 1930s and that Jiangxi period. So this is a significant army that's setting out on the Long March by 1934. It's not just sort of rattle-tattle. And of course, they have Soviet advisors and other people on the way as well.

44:49William:And the Soviets are on board at this point? They've abandoned the Nationalists? They're very much supporting the CCP? They are.

44:55Rana Mitter:Well, it's not so much that they've abandoned the Nationalists, as more than the nationalists have abandoned them. Chiang Kai-shek makes it very clear that he has no intention of allowing Soviet influence to continue.

45:04William:I want a picture of the long march run. So the people are marching in rank and file down a whole series of roads in uniform. I mean, they're driving cattle with them. What's the nature of it? There are air raids.

45:17Rana Mitter:What's going on? You know, large numbers of people in formation. These are trained troops now. They've had that Soviet influence. I mean, again, much of the countryside into which they're having to go is fairly hardscrabble. There's also different columns that emerge at different times. Some of the senior leaders and other figures are being carried at various points. They're not necessarily literally all walking, but they don't have military transportation or vehicles. The vast majority of what is being done is genuine walking, marching. They bivouac, they camp. Obviously, particularly in the initial period when you've got that many people.

45:51Rana Mitter:You have to have camp cooks and people who are providing, you know, sort of kitchen equipment.

45:56William:I mean, cooks for 80 ,000 people, there's no small feat of organisation.

46:01Rana Mitter:No small feat. No, no, absolutely. But 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.

46:13William:Are they marching animals with them? Are there kind of lines of pigs and sheep following

46:16Rana Mitter:them along the roads? I don't think pigs and sheep, although I'd be happy to correct it on that. Horses certainly in some cases, but what happens is that they're having to negotiate, either 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.

46:53Rana Mitter:So I think this, you know, grouping, turning up in a village and suggesting that it would be a very good idea if everyone got fed was probably an invitation that few peasants could say no to.

47:02William: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.

47:15Rana Mitter:Yes, He Zizhen is injured by a passing plane. It's fair to say that while there is a bit of use of air power at this stage, this is not still something that's commonplace in China. The Nationalists have a very small air force, a sort of very good air force, to be honest, at that point. Even if it didn't happen very often, it would be quite terrifying, I think, for people who were on the march at that time.

47:34Anita:Awful, yeah, and for Mal's wife really particularly awful 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

47:58Rana Mitter:Children almost certainly actually were mostly left behind That's one of the things you find plenty of stories of people who have small children who are essentially given away to village families. It's very tragic because they couldn't be maintained on a march like that.

48:12Anita:So this is, you know, as you say, it's painted as this great heroic episode in communist China. But actually, you know, beleaguered, destroyed people and, you know, the lucky survivors end up somewhere alive. Where does Mao end up? And how do we mark the end of the Long March?

48:30Rana Mitter:Two things just to say in terms of the 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 Zunyi, a partway along the march. And this is generally seen by the communists 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 Chinese communists accuse each other of, you know, where did it 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, has been made the most important one.

49:05Rana Mitter: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. But the central and most important immediate place is a place called Bauan in Shanxi province in northwest China. And that's where it becomes important because Mao and other people around him make a base there. And then a while later, move to a place which becomes much more legendary called Yen 'an, 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.

49:44Rana Mitter:So the Long March ends in several places, relatively close to each other.

49:48William:So by 1935, Rana, the march has reached its conclusion. There'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 removed.

50:02Rana Mitter:Yes, from being 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 Bayern, then later moves on to Yan 'an, 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.

50:33Anita:Just remember, this is at the same time that Imperial Japan has got its eye 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 we now know him as the chairman. And Willie, if people want to hear the next episode, what do they do?

51:02William:If they want to hear the next episode with our wonderful guest, Rana, and indeed the rest of the series, then they need to join the Empire Club. I would recommend that you forego a pint next month and instead for the same price, you can get early access, free shows, a weekly newsletter and book discounts. EmpirePodUK.com. That's where you need to go this minute.

51:25Anita: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 Arnon. And me, William de Rumpel.

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