Word: li
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Acting President Li Tsung-jen made a gallant gesture: with the Reds only a few miles away, he gave a brilliant reception for Nanking's foreign diplomatic corps. The city was feverish with people in flight. Its main street swarmed with donkey carts, pedicabs, rickshas swaying under high-piled loads of furniture, straw baskets, boxes and bundles. In the railway station, refugees spent their New Year's Eve stretched out on piles of miserable baggage, waiting for trains that did not come...
...Last Sentinels. But China did not yet have peace. The Reds, who had earlier agreed to negotiations, were making the most of victory. Acting President Li, in Nanking, sent an urgent personal appeal to Communist Boss Mao Tse-tung. The victor let the vanquished dangle. The Communist radio broadcast a statement that there could be no peace before the government had demonstrated its "sincerity" by handing over "war criminals" to the Communists: "Chiang Kai-shek is especially important. The said criminal has now fled and may very possibly go abroad to hide beneath the cloak of American and British imperialism...
Feeling the need to share his new knowledge with others, he inserted advertisements in newspapers inviting correspondence with fellow idealists. Four answered. Three of them later turned out to be "reactionaries." The fourth, a skinny youth called Li Lisan ("who listened to everything I had to say and then went away") was soon to become Mao's rival for the leadership of Chinese Communism...
...long. Chiang was one of the first to realize that cooperation with the Communists is possible only by surrendering to them. Chiang preferred not to surrender. By 1927, the Chinese Communists were once more on their own. In his native Hunan, Mao tirelessly tried to organize the peasants. But Li Lisan, Mao's noncommittal correspondent, was chosen by Moscow to head the Chinese party. In orthodox Marxist fashion, Li Lisan based his hopes on the urban proletariat; he considered China's peasant millions too backward to grasp the new revolutionary science...
...Li's city rebellions failed bloodily. Moscow deposed Li as a "half-Trotskyite" and ordered him to Russia for corrective education. "Lilisanism" was declared incorrect by Moscow. Mao Tse-tung meanwhile formulated a simple but fateful strategy: in an industrially backward country whose whole life depended on the peasantry, the Communists must win the peasants first, and give them arms...