Li's city rebellions failed bloodily. Moscow deposed Li as a "half-Trotskyite" and ordered him to Russia for corrective education. "Li Li-sanism" was declared incorrect by Moscow. Mao Tse-tung meanwhile formulated a simple but fateful strategy: in an industrially backward country whose whole life depended on the peasant", the Communists must win the peasants first, and give them arms.
When Mao succeeded Li as head of the Chinese Communist Party, he retreated with Communism's badly beaten bands to Kiangsi, in South China, where he managed to establish a Chinese Soviet. For three years, his headquarters were on Chingkan Shan, a nearly impregnable mountain stronghold which had been shared, uneasily, by bandits and Buddhist monks. Mao chased away the monks, welcomed most of the bandits into the party, and settled down to organizing the nucleus of the army which was to conquer China.
Down with Squash. In this task, Mao was joined by Chu Teh, now the second biggest star of Chinese Communism. A Yunnan officer and police commissioner, Chu Teh lived in a palatial home, smoked opium and kept several concubines. In 1922, to the indignation of all his friends, he sent his harem packing, broke himself of the opium habit. He went to Europe, studied in Moscow at the Eastern Toilers' Institute. In 1931, he was made commander in chief of the Chinese Red army, while Mao became political commissar. Chinese peasant legends, gleefully fostered by Communists, attribute superhuman powers to Chu-he could fly, he could see IOO li (33 miles) in all directions; he could stir dustclouds or winds against an enemy.
Mao looked after party discipline. In one year, he executed 4,300 politically unreliable comrades. Meanwhile, conditions on Chingkan Shan were becoming uncomfortable. Food was scarce and the Red army was forced for months to live on squash. The soldiers adopted a slogan: "Down with capitalism and squash-eating" Chiang Kai-shek, by then China's dominant figure, sent his armies against the southern Soviet "republics" and all but finished them in a series of "extermination campaigns." Once, when Mao went to the front to assume personal command, he exclaimed: "Aiya, how daring these bullets are! Don't they know that Chairman Mao is here?"
At this point the Japanese "intervention" in China drew Chiang's any's energies elsewhere. Mao and Chu, leading a Red armu of 80,000 men, were able to break through the Nationalist encirclement and flee to the northwest. Thus began what the Chinese Communists consider their great epic-the Long March
March with Mr. Soviet. The Reds marched 6,000 miles. They passed through twelve provinces, crossed 18 mountain ranges, and 24 rivers. Intermittently they fought with Nationalists, but they got away each time, with heavy losses. The marchers bad started out with a huge train of supplies, but they had to abandon most of it on the way. It is said that Mao Tsetung, then married to his third wife (Ho Tse-chun, a schoolteacher), abandoned their five children on the way, leaving them in the care of peasants.
