Mao plans to expand guerrilla warfare, and meets up with Peng Dehuai in Ruijin.
Further reading:
Pang Xianzhi and Jin Chongji, Mao Zedong: A Biography, vol. 1: 1893-1949
Stuart Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power, vol. 3: From the Jinggangshan to the Establishment of the Jiangxi Soviets, July 1927-December 1930
Stephen Averill, Revolution in the Highlands: China’s Jinggangshan Base Area
Peng Dehuai, Memoirs of a Chinese Marshall
Some names from this episode:
Yuan Wencai, Bandit leader who joined with Mao Zedong
Wang Zuo, Bandit leader who joined with Mao Zedong
He Changgong, secretary of the Ninggang County Party following the departure of the Fourth Red Army
Long Chaoqing, former secretary of the Ninggang County Committee of the Communist Party
Peng Dehuai, leader of the Fifth Red Army
Li Wenlin, Communist guerrilla commander
Duan Yuequan, Communist guerrilla commander
Liu Shiyi, Guomindang commander
Xiao Jiabi, reactionary militia leader
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 113 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
When we last left Mao Zedong, he had led his forces in taking the city of Changting, and he had spent the first few frantic days after taking Changting conducting social investigations, writing appeals to merchants, soldiers, and intellectuals to support the struggle, and working to set up a form of new and socialist public order in the city. The Communists had marched into Changting on March 14, 1929. Already on March 20, the Communists held a leadership meeting to decide on their next steps. Directly following this meeting, Mao drafted a letter to the Central Committee in which he gave a report about how the Red Army had fared since retreating from the Jinggangshan base, and what actions he planned to take in the immediate future.
We don’t need spend much time on Mao’s report on what all had happened since they had left the Jinggangshan base, since we went over that in some detail in past episodes. However, I do want to just read out a short section at the end of that part of the letter, in which he discusses the losses suffered along the way.
MRP3 150-151
Now, Yuan Wencai has been a major recurring figure in this podcast for some time now, so let’s talk for a minute about his desertion of the Red Army before coming back to talk about the plans that Mao laid out for the Red Army’s immediate future in his letter to the Central Committee.
Back in episode 100, I talked about the policy adopted by the Sixth Party Congress regarding how the Red Army should relate to bandits and former bandits. The policy boiled down to the formulation that “Before a given uprising, we can form an alliance with bandits. After the uprising, we should disarm them and eliminate their chiefs.” This was interpreted by some leading Communists in the base area to mean that Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo should be executed. As we discussed in episode 100, Mao defeated that proposal and also suppressed the new Party policy so that it did not become general knowledge, and even Yuan and Wang were not informed of it right away. As I discussed in that episode, this new policy did not reflect the Communist experience in the Jinggangshan, where the experience with incorporating bandits into the Red Army had been very successful. But really the Sixth Party Congress was not able to assimilate the Jinggangshan experience in any way, and there had been some other experiences that the Party had had with bandits (some of which we discussed in earlier episodes of this podcast, such as the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hubei in episode 59) that at least make the thought process behind this new policy somewhat comprehensible, even if clearly it would have been self-defeating to follow through on this policy in regard to the bandits who had joined the Communist cause in the Jinggang Mountains.
Anyways, at some point during the retreat from the Jinggangshan, either along the march route or during the rest that the Red Army took in Donggu that we talked about in episode 110, Yuan Wencai learned about this new policy and about the fact that, basically, the new official party policy was that he should be executed. He undoubtedly knew that Mao and Zhu De stood against this policy, but also knew that Mao might not be able to protect him forever if the party leadership was hell-bent on carrying out this policy. (And, by the way, in looking back at episode 100 I can see that I misspoke there about the length of time that it took for Yuan and Wang to learn about the new policy which basically called for their deaths. In that episode, I said that it would be a few months before they learned about the contents of the Congress resolution, but what I meant to say was that it would be a few weeks, about five or six weeks more or less, from the time at the very beginning of 1929 when that information arrived in the Jinggangshan to when they actually learned about it.)
Now, Donggu is not, as the crow flies, very far from the Jinggangshan. There is a lot of up-and-down along the way and a big river and valley to cross, but, if you look at a map, you can see that they are not super far apart. Having learned about this new policy and sort of entered into a kind of personal crisis as a result, Yuan Wencai deserted the Red Army during its rest and recuperation time in Donggu in the second half of February and headed back home to the Jinggangshan.
When Yuan unexpectedly showed up at some point in March, Wang Zuo, who had remained with the force left behind, asked him why he had deserted the Red Army. Yuan explained that he felt threatened by the new policy and also felt homesick, so he returned back to his home territory which was more familiar and hopefully safer.
Actually though, Yuan’s desertion of the Red Army had put him in a much less safe position, because his local enemies could demand that he be punished for desertion if for nothing else, and because he had no formal position in either the party or the army in the Jinggangshan.
Wang Zuo contacted He Changgong, the new secretary of the Ninggang County Party Committee. He was someone we’ve met a few times in past episodes and was someone who had played a key role in integrating Wang and Yuan’s bandit forces into the Red Army, and so was quite sympathetic to Yuan (unlike Long Chaoqing, the former secretary of the Ninggang County Party who He had replaced, and who was one of Yuan’s enemies, as we discussed in episode 100). Wang and He worked out a situation where Yuan received a mild punishment, basically a reprimand, and was able to take up work as a local party cadre, but without any position in the army (at least at first). They also enlisted the help of Yuan’s wife in keeping an eye on him in making sure that he didn’t commit suicide because of his severely depressed condition, which they were very worried about.
Yuan was badly needed in helping the base area to recover from the white terror that had taken place when it was occupied by the Guomindang after the retreat first of Mao’s Fourth Red Army and soon afterward of Peng Dehuai’s Fifth Red Army. And as he progressed in his work of reconstructing the base area, his depression gradually faded.
So, that’s the brief story of Yuan Wencai’s desertion. One of these days soon I’ll put together an episode on what all happened in the Jinggangshan after Mao left and we will follow Yuan’s story a bit further. Now, let’s return to our discussion of Mao’s March 20 letter to the Central Committee.
Here’s the key passage from the letter where Mao describes the current military situation in Jiangxi and western Fujian, and what his plans are for the immediate future:
MRP3 148-149 points 5 and 6
To just sort of sum up what is written here, essentially Mao is saying, let’s take advantage of this war that is breaking out between the Guangxi warlord clique and Chiang Kai-shek, what came to be called the Central Plains War, and start up guerrilla warfare nice and good across more than 20 counties in southern Jiangxi and western Fujian with the aim of setting up a new independent Soviet regime, one occupying more territory and with a more solid economic basis that what they had had in the Jinggangshan. This was the overall plan, but we can also see that Mao was very much feeling out the situation, saying that he was going to take the army up around Ruijin and Ningdu and wage some guerrilla warfare and do some mass work up there and then, depending on how that went and on how the overall political and military situation was developing with the Guomindang and the warlords, decide what to do next.
You may have noted in the excerpt from Mao’s March 20 letter to the Central Committee that I just read that Mao refers to some actions taken by Peng Dehuai’s Fifth Red Army. What this means is that the Fifth and Fourth Red Armies had gotten in touch with each other, and the next step for them in coordinating their actions was to meet up and figure out what to do next. So, after 17 days in Changting, the Fourth Red Army marched out and met up with the Fifth Red Army in Ruijin, in southern Jiangxi, on April 1. Check out the map that I used as the episode artwork for episodes 109 and 110 to see where that is in relation to Changting.
Just like the Fourth Red Army had a whole dramatic story to its retreat from the Jinggangshan, through to their defeat of the Guomindang at Dabodi, their recuperation at Donggu, and then the capture of Changting, the Fifth Red Army also had a very eventful and dangerous long escape from the encirclement of the Jinggangshan.
When Mao Zedong and Zhu De broke out from the Jinggangshan on January 14, they were pursued by one of the enemy brigades encircling the base area. This delayed the Guomindang offensive somewhat, but there was only so much that the remaining Communist forces could do with the extra preparation time in waiting for the Guomindang assault on their mountain stronghold. There were about 1000 to 1200 Communist troops trying to defend against well over 20,000 Guomindang soldiers. While the Communists had prevailed over larger enemy numbers in the past, including at the battle of Huangyangjie that we discussed in episode 94, the numbers that the Communists were facing now were much stronger, and the Communist leadership pretty much accepted the inevitability of the white forces overrunning the base area. The main question was, how long would the Guomindang occupy the area and what would be the consequences of the occupation.
While the Communists did attempt to defend the base area at key points, one of the main elements of preparing for the Guomindang onslaught was preparing for how to hide from the white forces during the upcoming occupation. Communists who were from the area, such as the members of Wang Zuo’s 32nd regiment of the Fourth Red Army, which had stayed behind, had the option of trying to go underground and hide among family and friends in an area that they knew very well (although all the time hoping that someone who sided with the enemy didn’t find out where they were and inform on them). But for people from outside the area, like Peng Dehuai and his Fifth Red Army, the only real option for self-preservation was to follow in the Fourth Red Army’s footsteps and retreat from the base area.
Still, they had been assigned to defend the base, and there were also hundreds of red army sick and wounded who couldn’t be evacuated, so even while keeping the possibility of retreat in mind, an effort was made to defend the base, even though the Communist leadership realized that it was probably a futile effort.
On January 26, the Guomindang launched a coordinated assault on the base, attacking all the main approaches to the base area simultaneously. They achieved their big breakthrough on January 29 with the help of a local informant, a rich peasant, or, more accurately, a formerly rich peasant who resented having had his land confiscated, who guided the Guomindang forces up little known and unguarded paths through a dense fog that covered their movements. They appeared suddenly on the flank of the Communist defenders along the Huangyangjie approach up the mountain and threw the Communist forces there into disarray, and then began marching in the direction of the Communist headquarters at Ciping, stopping at a Communist hospital along the way to massacre more than a hundred helpless patients there.
Facing the imminent prospect of having the red army headquarters overrun, Peng retreated with his troops to meet up with Wang Zuo and the 32nd regiment at Wang’s home village. There, Wang gave Peng details on a very high mountain path to the south that would allow the Fifth Red Army to escape the base area. Then, all the troops were assembled, and the several hundred local forces who wished to join the Fifth Army in escaping swelled its ranks to a thousand or more. The Communists then executed about two dozen local elites who they had been holding captive and began their march south out of the base.
Peng Dehuai describes the retreat like this in his memoirs:
Peng 234-235
Back in episode 108, we saw that when the Fourth Red Army emerged from the mountains into Dafen they had the good luck to surprise a Guomindang batallion there. But the Fifth Army was not so lucky and ran right into a bunch of very well-prepared landlord militia troops led by Xiao Jiabi, an old archnemesis of Wang Zuo and Yuan Wencai who we met back in episodes 67 and 68. Only half of Peng’s army managed to punch through the militia’s lines and move on. Everyone else, including the various red guard local forces and wounded troops who were accompanying the Fifth Red Army on its retreat, had to go back up the way they had come into the mountains or were wiped out by the militia.
After breaking through in Dafen, Peng continued to roughly follow the same route that Mao had followed south to Dayu County. There, the Fifth Army was caught sleeping in the middle of the night by enemy forces, even the watch that had been posted had fallen asleep according to Peng Dehuai. In the confused retreat that followed the surprise attack, half of the Fifth Red Army fled east, and the other half, following behind but far enough away that they couldn’t tell where the troops in front of them had gone, turned the other way at a crossroads and went into Guangdong province where they were eventually wiped out. After this battle, Peng Dehuai was left with less than 300 men out of more than 1000 who had left the base area with him.
But when they got to Yudu County, the Communists’ luck changed. Here’s how Peng describes how things went in Yudu (by the way, in this quote Peng uses the unit of measurement of distance ‘li.’ One li is a half-kilometer, or just under a third of a mile.):
Peng 238-240
For the next few weeks, the Fifth Red Army roamed across Yudu and neighboring Anyuan County, conducting mass work and rebuilding its strength. And so, when the Fifth Army met up with the Fourth Army at Ruijin on April 1, it numbered about 600 troops and had largely recuperated from the defeats that it had suffered as it escaped from the Jinggangshan.
But whatever plans that Mao, Zhu, and Peng thought they were going to be making when they met at Ruijin, they quickly had to deal with a blow from an unexpected source. On April 3, a letter arrived in Ruijin from the Central Committee recalling Mao Zedong and Zhu De to Shanghai.
We’ll pick up next episode with a discussion of this letter.
One little bit of housekeeping before I end this episode. Those of you who listen on Apple Podcasts may have noticed that there is a new transcript feature in that app. The thing about that feature is that it doesn’t do a very good job with Chinese names. For example, at least last time that I looked, Changting was getting transcribed as Chongqing, the capital of Sichuan Province, presumably because that word is much more commonly used and so the transcription AI assumes that is what I am saying. So, if you want an accurate transcript, I suggest going to peopleshistoryofideas.com, where I post the transcripts for each episode. Unfortunately, Apple will not let me upload my own transcripts to override those that it generates on its own.
OK, that’s it for now.
Until next time, be well.