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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 100 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 Kaishek, 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 energies elsewhere. Mao and Chu, leading a Red army 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 had started out with a huge train of supplies, but they had to abandon most of it on the way. It is said that Mao Tse-tung, 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.
The marchers lived off the land, though the Communists never mentioned plunder, spoke only of "confiscation committees." Provincial populations fled in terror before "Mr. Soviet," as the Red army became known. The Reds' first great obstacle was the Yangtze, where Chiang hoped to stop them. A Red detachment in captured Nationalist uniforms managed to take a small river port which permitted the whole army to cross. But the most famous incident on the Long March was the crossing of the Tatu River, where a detachment of Communists swung across hand over hand on the bare iron chains of a half-destroyed suspension bridge, straight into Nationalist machine-gun fire.
Mao Tse-tung made the entire march on foot, except for a few weeks when he was ailing. After a year, the marchers arrived in bleak Shensi. Of the 80,000 who had started out, only 20,000 reached their promised, unpromising land. Mao Tse-tung moved into a convenient cave in the cave-city of Yenan, just below the Great Wall, and proceeded to build his beaten Communist remnants into a new Soviet state.