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CHINA, CIVIL WAR and JAPAN'S INTRUSION (3 of 4)

Having settled with the Japanese, Chiang planned a campaign against the Communists in Jiangxi Province, which began in May, 1934. It was another encircling action. Slowly it tightened around the Communist positions. The Communists in Jiangxi had come under the leadership of a Comintern agent, Otto Braun, who had convinced the Communists that the glorious age of guerrilla warfare was over and that it was time to fight regular battles. Mao disagreed and removed himself from military planning meetings, making himself a common soldier. The Communists also tried using block-houses, but their tactics failed, Chiang's forces having airplanes as well as artillery. Communist-held territory shrank, and the turn to zealous class warfare by the Communists further diminished enthusiasm among those who had supported them.

In October, 1934, the Communists were forced to flee from Jiangxi. Those who remained in Jiangxi were pursued and many rounded up, tortured and sent to a concentration camp. Others began what was to become known as the Long March. They numbered around 87,000, including 50 women, the families of Red Army men and entire peasant households. With them they hauled small printing presses, duplicating machines, sewing machines and other home-industry tools. They stopped in towns and made their own clothing and shoes.

For almost a year the marchers zigzagged across eighteen mountains, deserts, rivers and swamplands, from the south of China, westward and then north, chased by Chiang's forces and by warlord armies. Some froze to death. Some starved. Mao's third wife, He Zizhen, was wounded in a dive bombing attack, with shrapnel in her body and a piece in her head that was too dangerous to remove. She had to ride in a cart or be strapped to a mule.

After trekking 6,000 miles the marchers had dwindled to about 7,000, less than one-tenth their original size. They arrived at an arid and agriculturally unproductive location in the far north, at Yenan, about 300 miles west of Beijing, a more impoverished area than Jiangxi, and more sparsely populated. It was a propitious location -- closer to the Russians and the Japanese. There a few Communists had already established themselves, and more were trickling in, running from Guomindang forces. Another long march, in November 1935, was just beginning from central China, by a Red army titled the Second Front Army. And with this army, other Red army units were to arrive at Yenan the following year.

At Yenan, Mao had time to relax and think. He stayed in his room for days, meditating. Like some others in or emerging from pain and suffering, he dreamed. He dreamed of remaking the whole of China and setting the world on the course of new organization. He worked through his Marxist ideology -- what he believed to be scientific socialism -- and he emerged convinced of the validity of class struggle and Lenin's hypothesis that imperialism was the end part of dying capitalism. The transition from capitalism to socialism was, he believed, inevitable -- aside from the struggle and violence needed to bring it about. His knowledge of the world outside of China came mostly from Communist publications, from which he had learned that moderate socialists -- the Social Democrats -- were opportunists, that in seeking gains for themselves they had forsaken the building of real socialism and that they would always betray real revolutionaries. And he believed that Western democracies were imperialist and in essence bourgeois dictatorships.