The execution of Mao Zemin

Late in the evening of 27 September 1943, in Ürümqi (then Dihua), the capital of Xinjiang province, men of Governor Sheng Shicai secretly put three prisoners to death: Mao Zemin, the younger brother of Mao Zedong; Chen Tanqiu, one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party; and Lin Jilu, a communist activist working in the provincial administration. According to Chinese sources they were strangled, and their bodies were buried in unmarked graves at the Liudaowan cemetery outside the city. The date of 27 September, given by Chinese historiography and encyclopaedias, derives from testimony given in 1950 by the head of the execution squad. The communist leadership in Yan’an learned of the three men’s deaths only after the war.

Xinjiang between Moscow and Chongqing

Sheng Shicai, a Han Chinese born in Manchuria and an officer trained in Japan, seized effective power in Xinjiang in 1933, during a civil war with Muslim rebels. He held on thanks to help from the Soviet Union, which sent its troops into the province in 1934. In return Xinjiang became in effect a Soviet protectorate: Soviet advisers ran affairs in Ürümqi, and Soviet enterprises exploited the province’s oil and metals. Sheng proclaimed himself a Marxist and a friend of the USSR, and according to some sources he was even admitted to the Bolshevik party in 1938. As in the USSR, he also carried out bloody purges of real and supposed opponents.

After the united front was formed and war with Japan broke out, Xinjiang was an important window on the USSR for the Chinese communists. The party had an office in Ürümqi, headed in turn by Chen Yun, Deng Fa and, from 1939, Chen Tanqiu. At Sheng’s request the party sent several dozen cadres to work in his administration, where they ran the province’s schools, offices and finances. Among them was Mao Zemin, who arrived in Ürümqi in February 1938 and, under the assumed name Zhou Bin, became deputy director and then acting director of the finance department; in 1941 he took over the department of civil affairs.

The three murdered men

Mao Zemin was born in 1896 in Shaoshan in Hunan province, into the same peasant family as Mao Zedong. He had only a few years of schooling, and within the party he became above all a specialist in finance and economics. He joined the party in 1922, organised a miners’ cooperative at Anyuan, and in the days of the Chinese Soviet Republic at Ruijin he ran its state bank and issued its currency. On the Long March he was responsible for supplies and the treasury, and in Shaanxi for the economy of the Soviet area.

Chen Tanqiu, born in 1896 in Hubei and a graduate of the higher teachers’ college in Wuhan, was one of the leaders of the May Fourth Movement in that city. Together with Dong Biwu he founded the local communist group and in July 1921 represented it at the party’s founding congress in Shanghai – the same congress attended by Mao Zedong. Lin Jilu, a generation younger than them, came to Xinjiang in 1938, taught in Ürümqi and later headed the administration of Kuqa county.

Sheng’s about-turn

Germany’s attack on the USSR in June 1941 and the defeats of the Red Army convinced Sheng that his Soviet patron was weakening. In March 1942 his brother Sheng Shiqi died in unclear circumstances; according to one version it was part of a Soviet plot, according to another the governor himself ordered the killing. Sheng used it as a pretext to move against “Moscow’s agents” and began to draw closer to Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Chongqing. In the summer of 1942 a government delegation including General Zhu Shaoliang arrived in Ürümqi, and in August Soong Mei-ling flew in. In the autumn, during the Battle of Stalingrad, Sheng demanded the withdrawal of Soviet military and technical personnel; the Russians left the province in the spring of 1943, and their place was taken by Kuomintang troops and officials.

Part of this about-turn was a crackdown on the communists. On 17 September 1942 Sheng summoned them “for talks”, then detained more than 140 party members and their families and placed them under house arrest on the outskirts of Ürümqi. On 7 February 1943 the leaders were transferred to prison. Sheng’s interrogators used torture to force them to confess to an alleged communist plot to stage an armed coup (the so-called 12 April case) and to renounce their party membership. According to Chinese sources, Mao Zemin, Chen Tanqiu and Lin Jilu refused; three other detainees made the required statements.

Sentence and execution

The affair was not Sheng’s work alone. According to Chinese historiography, based on documents and post-war testimony, in the summer of 1943 a group of investigators and military judges flew to Ürümqi from Chongqing, most of them officers of the Kuomintang’s party intelligence service (the so-called Zhongtong) under Xu Enzeng. Together with Sheng’s men they interrogated the detainees and sentenced the defendants in the “12 April case” – including Mao Zemin, Chen Tanqiu and Lin Jilu – to death. The files went to Chiang Kai-shek, who had one of his intelligence officers review them. That officer noted in his diary that all the charges rested solely on confessions, “without any material evidence”, but that the matter had to be settled “in accordance with the wishes” of Sheng. Chongqing’s consent to carry out the sentences reached Ürümqi in September.

The execution was carried out late in the evening of 27 September by Sheng’s police and, according to Chinese sources, supervised by Kuomintang agents, who sent confirmation to Chongqing. In October 1944, at the request of the intelligence service, the graves were dug up so that the bodies could be photographed. Among those still under arrest were Mao Zemin’s wife, Zhu Danhua, and their young son Mao Yuanxin, later an activist of the Cultural Revolution.

For a long time the party leadership in Yan’an did not know what had happened to its people. The communists raised the question of those imprisoned in Xinjiang in talks with the government in 1943 and 1944, and Mao Zedong was still demanding the release of political prisoners during the negotiations in Chongqing in the autumn of 1945. Only in 1946 did the province’s new governor, Zhang Zhizhong, release 129 surviving communists and members of their families, who reached Yan’an in July. The circumstances of the three men’s deaths were cleared up after the People’s Liberation Army took over Xinjiang: in 1950 the head of the execution squad was arrested and pointed out the graves, and in April 1951 the perpetrators were executed. In 1956 the remains of Mao Zemin, Chen Tanqiu and Lin Jilu were laid to rest in the revolutionary martyrs’ cemetery in Ürümqi.

Place in the war

The killing in Ürümqi was an episode in the civil war waged in the shadow of the war with Japan. It took place at the same time as the Americans – General Joseph Stilwell, for example, in his September proposals – were considering how to induce the Nationalists and the communists to fight the Japanese together, while both sides were rather preparing to settle accounts with each other. For the Kuomintang, taking control of Xinjiang and eliminating communist influence in the province was one of its few successes of 1943: for the first time in years the government gained real power there, and the communists lost their route to the USSR.

Sheng Shicai did not profit from it for long. When in 1944 the tide of war turned in the USSR’s favour, he tried to switch sides again, arrested Kuomintang officials and appealed to Moscow for help. Moscow ignored him, and the government recalled him from Xinjiang: in August 1944 he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, and in September he left for Chongqing. In the autumn of 1944 a Soviet-backed rising broke out in the Ili district, from which the Second East Turkestan Republic emerged. Sheng went with the Kuomintang to Taiwan, where he died in 1970; in memoirs written in the 1950s he maintained that he had broken up a genuine Soviet-communist conspiracy.

In the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zemin, Chen Tanqiu and Lin Jilu were recognised as revolutionary martyrs. Their deaths added to the toll in Mao Zedong’s family: his first wife, Yang Kaihui, had been executed by the Nationalists in 1930, his brother Mao Zetan had been killed in 1935, and his eldest son, Mao Anying, was to be killed in Korea in 1950.