Nelson Fu - Move To The Jiangxi Soviet Capital

Move To The Jiangxi Soviet Capital

Dr. Fu's long personal association with Mao began in October (1932), when the Head of State retreated to Tingzhou after losing an important leadership struggle: at the Ningdu Conference, a tempestuous Party meeting at Ningdu (宁都县), JX, the Party Chair Zhou Enlai had been voted top political commissar for the Red Army, foiling Mao's control over any of its columns. Now officially convalescing, Mao entered the Tingzhou Gospel Hospital as a patient for the first time, becoming in a Chinese manner of reckoning Dr.Fu's honoured guest. Mao though spent most days with his pregnant wife and another married couple in a nearby two-storey villa, formerly the property of a wealthy Christian.

More contact came in November when the Mao baby was born: the attending physician was Fu - or, some sources say, Chen Binghui, another of Fu's son-in-laws. He Zizhen was Mao's second wife (discounting his detested 1908 arranged marriage); her baby was Mao's fourth son, but the first that Mao's bodyguards had seen, and was soon known to them—and to the Jiangxi Soviet leadership—as Xiao Mao (Little Mao).

In January 1933 the Russian-trained Bo Gu (博古) arrived in Ruijin and assumed the position of Party Chair, leaving Zhou to concentrate on directing the CSR's military, the First Red Army. This he did with increasing success (the Nanjing government's Generalissimo Jiang Kaishek would be forced to call off his Fourth Encirclement Campaign in March). Bo came to the conclusion, held by many, that Zhou had been far too lenient with the CSR's recalcitrant Head of State, and now commenced cutting the separate lines of command leading out of Tingzhou. Compelled to return to Ruijin, Mao had the Hospital of the Gospel dismantled and carted along to be reassembled for the exclusive benefit of the leadership. Having found himself made the Head of State's personal physician, Dr.Fu (with the remaining members of his family), was also relocated to the red capital.

Mao's hardly triumphal return in February caused Chairman Bo to quip that Mao would be "just a Kalinin now", comparing him to the USSR's Head of State 1919-1946, a figure not much now remembered. But Mao soon displayed his mettle, devising and driving a savage campaign to root kulaks out of the two provinces under his purview. Nelson Fu was protected from the worst of this campaign but at some low point in his eventual 20 months at Ruijin he contracted TB.

Generalissimo Jiang was meanwhile getting sound military advice in the person of Hans von Seeckt. Their Fifth Encirclement Campaign began that autumn and would destroy the Jiangxi base within the space of a year. Attempting to counter the strategy of the right-wing German were a German military advisor of the opposite persuasion, Otto Braun (李德), stationed by the Com-Intern inside the CSR territory, and -underground in Shanghai- Manfred Stern, a Jewish Austro-Hungarian soon to achieve fame in the Spanish Civil War as General Kléber of the International Brigade.

By the spring of 1934 Bo, Zhou and Braun had made the decision to retreat the First Red Army out of the Jiangxi-Fujian border area. Head of State Mao, like the rearguard forces and the civilian population, was to go down with the ship. In August though Mao changed his residence to Yudu County (于都县), JX, athwart the route of retreat. Here he was visited by Lin Biao, who helped to secure him places in the caravan. Mao called his wife over from Ruijin, telling her to leave Xiao Mao with the boy's uncle, Mao Zetan (毛泽覃), a leader of the rearguard. Mao was now infected by one or more of the millions of mosquitoes besetting Yudu with a malarial parasite, and on the very eve of the retreat in October he was feverish and in severe pain. Nelson Fu was summoned from Ruijin and managed to get the Head of State looking fit enough to travel. The doctor was thus also booked into the great retreat, a horse found to carry him, and chickens to sustain him. Through the long months of what has since become the national-mythological Long March, He Zizhen would see the doctor many times, and always think of the son whom he'd delivered, and whose second birthday she'd had to miss.