How the Post, and Chiang Kai-shek’s army, were fooled by Mao Zedong

In his early military career, Mao Zedong employed tactics that fooled not only the Nationalist army, but also the South China Morning Post. A look at some of the first mentions of Mao in the pages of the Post shows how the slow transmission of news muddied the reader’s understanding of what was happening in the field.

In 1927, civil war broke out between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communists. The KMT launched several encircle­ment cam­paigns in an attempt to isolate and destroy the Red Army in their bases, but Mao man­aged to thwart these efforts.

When it came to the second encirclement campaign, in Jiangxi province, on June 1, 1931, the Post reported favourably on the Nationalists. The KMT had recaptured several towns in the province that May, and a government report speculated “from the latest movements of the Red armies … commanded by Mao Tse-Tung and Chu Teh, they intend to concen­trate the communist bandits of Jiangxi in south Jiangxi”.

However, the Nationalists had misjudged the situation and the information they pro­vided in the report passed to the Post was inaccur­ate. For a month, the Com­munists had been secretly gather­ing troops in Tonggu, close to the Nationalist forces, while giving the appear­ance of moving south. In the week before the article was published, the situation in Jiangxi had changed drama­tically and a Communist counter-offensive had retaken all lost territory and annihi­lated more than 30,000 Nationalist troops.

During the third encirclement campaign, on August 6, 1931, the Post reported that an attempt by Mao’s army to break through the government cordon and cross the Gan river had failed. But Mao had hoodwinked the Nationalists – and the Post – once again. With one division disguised as the main army heading towards the Gan, the rest of Mao’s soldiers escaped safely though a gap in Nationalist forces and then wiped out a KMT army brigade on August 7.