Word: chingkan
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While Chiang fought the northern warlords, Mao became a warlord in his own right. On Chingkan Shan, celebrated bandit mountain lair, he joined forces with the local outlaws, soon merged them in his new Red army.* It was a guerrilla force, highly mobile, terroristic, levying an ever-expanding countryside for recruits and supplies, fighting not for the ordinary warlord's booty but for a Red revolution within the Nationalist revolution...
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...
...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...
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