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Authors: Margaret MacMillan
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his base in France, Chou managed a considerable amount of travel—to London, which he did not like, and to Germany, which he found more congenial. Increasingly he made a name for himself among his fellow Chinese, as an organizer, writer, and revolutionary. (The French police eventually got wind of his activities, but only six months after he had returned to China.) In the summer of 1922, he helped found a European branch of the new Chinese Communist Party. Although he could not know it, he was preparing himself for his future management of China’s foreign affairs. 11
Chou came home to China in the summer of 1924. Warlords were running the country, but in the south a new political movement was growing. Sun Yat-sen’s Guomindang, or National People’s Party, was, as its name suggested, nationalist and, in those days, a mix of radicals and workers on the one hand and the propertied classes on the other. The party was building new branches and creating its own army with support from the Soviet Union, which saw this as a way to strike at the imperialists. The Soviets ordered the tiny Chinese Communist Party to cooperate faithfully with them. Let the Guomindang unite China and kick out the Western powers, and then the Chinese Communists, the revolutionary experts in Moscow asserted, could overthrow the bourgeois forces represented by the Guomindang and have a proper socialist revolution. Chou, although this was later played down in accounts in China, worked tirelessly for the coalition and, indeed, ended up virtually running the Guomindang’s military academy.
He also found time to marry Deng Yingchao, herself by now an experienced revolutionary. Perhaps there was some love involved, but their relationship seems to have been more a political partnership. Chou apparently told a niece years later that he had given up a woman he loved because he needed a revolutionary comrade: “And so I chose your aunt.” Deng, like Chou, was prepared to commit herself wholeheartedly. When she became pregnant shortly after their marriage, she had an abortion. “We felt,” the couple said later, “a child would interfere with our work.” She had miscarriages later but never her own children. Like many of the revolutionary wives, she paid a price. In the early 1930s, she came down with tuberculosis and had to be carried on a litter for much of the Long March when the Communists fled through the Chinese countryside from their former allies, the Guomindang. 12
At the end of the 1920s there seemed to be a moment of hope for China: the Guomindang, now under the leadership of Chiang Kaishek, managed to bring most of the country under at least nominal control. China at last had a central government that worked. In response, possibly because they felt guilty about their years of exploitation of China, most of the foreign powers started to give back the concessions they had wrung out of China over the previous century; Japan alone held back. The Communists were not there to share in the triumph because Chiang Kai-shek turned on them as soon as he no longer needed their help. By the end of 1927, the Communist organization, which had been strongest in the cities, was shattered and thousands of Communists had been killed or thrown in jail. A few scattered groups remained at large, out in the countryside, where they lived hand to mouth like bandits. Chou, with a substantial price on his head, went underground in Shanghai and, with what was left of the Communist Party’s organization, managed to escape the Guomindang’s attentions until the start of the 1930s.
The Communists’ disaster was made worse by incompetent and impossible instructions from Communist International headquarters in Moscow. The Soviets, however, invariably laid the blame on the Chinese Communists themselves. Chou somehow managed to avoid the repeated purges of the Chinese leadership. He made abject self-criticisms to the Communist Party whenever necessary. In 1931, as the
Chou came home to China in the summer of 1924. Warlords were running the country, but in the south a new political movement was growing. Sun Yat-sen’s Guomindang, or National People’s Party, was, as its name suggested, nationalist and, in those days, a mix of radicals and workers on the one hand and the propertied classes on the other. The party was building new branches and creating its own army with support from the Soviet Union, which saw this as a way to strike at the imperialists. The Soviets ordered the tiny Chinese Communist Party to cooperate faithfully with them. Let the Guomindang unite China and kick out the Western powers, and then the Chinese Communists, the revolutionary experts in Moscow asserted, could overthrow the bourgeois forces represented by the Guomindang and have a proper socialist revolution. Chou, although this was later played down in accounts in China, worked tirelessly for the coalition and, indeed, ended up virtually running the Guomindang’s military academy.
He also found time to marry Deng Yingchao, herself by now an experienced revolutionary. Perhaps there was some love involved, but their relationship seems to have been more a political partnership. Chou apparently told a niece years later that he had given up a woman he loved because he needed a revolutionary comrade: “And so I chose your aunt.” Deng, like Chou, was prepared to commit herself wholeheartedly. When she became pregnant shortly after their marriage, she had an abortion. “We felt,” the couple said later, “a child would interfere with our work.” She had miscarriages later but never her own children. Like many of the revolutionary wives, she paid a price. In the early 1930s, she came down with tuberculosis and had to be carried on a litter for much of the Long March when the Communists fled through the Chinese countryside from their former allies, the Guomindang. 12
At the end of the 1920s there seemed to be a moment of hope for China: the Guomindang, now under the leadership of Chiang Kaishek, managed to bring most of the country under at least nominal control. China at last had a central government that worked. In response, possibly because they felt guilty about their years of exploitation of China, most of the foreign powers started to give back the concessions they had wrung out of China over the previous century; Japan alone held back. The Communists were not there to share in the triumph because Chiang Kai-shek turned on them as soon as he no longer needed their help. By the end of 1927, the Communist organization, which had been strongest in the cities, was shattered and thousands of Communists had been killed or thrown in jail. A few scattered groups remained at large, out in the countryside, where they lived hand to mouth like bandits. Chou, with a substantial price on his head, went underground in Shanghai and, with what was left of the Communist Party’s organization, managed to escape the Guomindang’s attentions until the start of the 1930s.
The Communists’ disaster was made worse by incompetent and impossible instructions from Communist International headquarters in Moscow. The Soviets, however, invariably laid the blame on the Chinese Communists themselves. Chou somehow managed to avoid the repeated purges of the Chinese leadership. He made abject self-criticisms to the Communist Party whenever necessary. In 1931, as the
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