A close look at Zhou Enlai’s February 7, 1929, letter to Mao Zedong and Zhu De.
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
E. H. Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy, vol. 3
Tony Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party
Some names from this episode:
Zhou Enlai, head of the Organization Department of the Central Committee
Xiang Zhongfa, General secretary of the CP
Li Lisan, Leading Communist
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 114 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
When we ended the last episode, the 4th and 5th Red Armies had just reunited in Ruijin, where they received a very important letter from the Party Center. I want to take a close look at both the letter from the Party Center that Mao received on April 3, 1929, and also at the response that Mao sent back two days later. These are both important documents which demonstrate how major actors in the Chinese Revolution were thinking (in sometimes divergent ways) about how to give concrete, practical form to grand strategic visions of the revolution.
So, let’s start with the letter from the Party Center.
That letter was written by Zhou Enlai in his capacity as head of the Organization Department of the Central Committee on February 7, 1929. One point to keep in mind when we read this letter was that it was written with very little concrete knowledge about what was going on with the Fourth Red Army. Mao’s November 25, 1928, report to the Central Committee (which we discussed in episode 98) had not reached the Party Center in Shanghai. Zhou Enlai had only just gotten back in November from attending the Sixth Party Congress in Moscow. And so, having only received limited intelligence about the activities of the Fourth Red Army since then, we can assume that his views about the activities of Mao Zedong and Zhu De had not changed much since he had given his report on military affairs at the Sixth Party Congress.
In that report, Zhou Enlai observed that Mao had had a sizable armed force at the time of the autumn harvest risings; but that he was continually ‘flying from place to place,’ and that his forces had ‘a bandit character.’ And now he was moving along the Hunan-Jiangxi border with an estimated force of not more than a thousand. So, as we can see, Zhou did not have a particularly favorable opinion of what Mao was doing at this time, and this opinion reflected both the imperfect information that Zhou had at his disposal, as well as the urban bias that Zhou Enlai held at the time regarding how the revolutionary process should unfold.
OK, here’s Zhou Enlai’s letter:
Saich 471
To clarify here, Runzhi is Mao Zedong and Yujie is Zhu De.
Saich 471
I want to highlight the suspicion of enemy infiltration of the West Jiangxi Special Committee. The suspicion of enemy infiltration is going to come to a head with a particularly ugly set of events in 1930 and 1931. For now, the letter moves on from this, but keep in mind that this is an issue that is going to come back up in a big way.
The next two paragraphs here are summarized from the actual letter. Now, the editor of the document collection that I am using, Tony Saich, doesn’t clarify as to whether he is the one who did the summarizing or whether the summary is in the copy of the letter that he translated from the document collection put together by the Central Party Archives in China. Judging from the content, my guess is that the summary was done by the Central Party Archives. It is not at all unknown for documents dealing with Communist Party history to be presented in incomplete form when printed for a public audience. Anyways, here it is:
Saich 472
Ok, that’s the end of the summarized section. One thing to note here, is that again we see the Comintern analysis that we saw in episode 102 when we talked about Bukharin’s speech at the Sixth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in June 1928, this idea that the coming world war was going to be between the United States and Britain.
Another thing to note in this summary is that Zhou Enlai says, look, our organization in the cities has basically been smashed. But our central task is still in the cities and in particular to develop bases among with the proletariat. It is interesting to see how Mao responds to this assertion in his reply, so we will come back to this point then.
What follows the summarized portion of the letter is a fairly long paragraph in which Zhou Enlai gives instructions on how the Fourth Army should deploy its forces. Here it is:
Saich 472-473
Mao is going to have a very concrete rebuttal to Zhou Enlai’s general guidance in his April 5 response, so most of this we will address when we see what Mao says in response.
But there is one sentence here with a very loaded reference which I want to unpack. It is where Zhou Enlai says that “you must never follow the ways of the army of the Taiping Rebellion.”
What exactly is meant by this?
Basically, it’s the idea that the Red Army should operate as a kind of large scale, mobile force for guerrilla warfare (even more so than it already did that), and that the Taiping revolution had a form of military organization that was particularly well-suited to guerrilla warfare (and, in the minds of some Chinese Communist leaders, more suited to guerrilla warfare than the Fourth Red Army’s current form of organization). Here’s some background on this idea:
On May 25, 1928, the Central Committee had issued a directive titled “Outline of Military Work.” This directive ordered the Red Army to reorganize itself according to the “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom pattern of organization.” When this directive finally arrived in the Jinggangshan, Mao had been unable to decode it. And so, in his November 25, 1928 report to the Central Committee, Mao said that “We are unable to decode the Central Committee’s “Resolution on Military Work” and are unable to guess at the organization of the army of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Please prepare another copy of the document and send it to us, so as to facilitate discussion.”
Then, despite not knowing the content of the Central Committee’s directive, the idea that “The Red Army should copy the military organization of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom” was brought up as a motion to be discussed at the Sixth Congress of Party Representatives of the Fourth Red Army in early December, 1928, but because the Congress had to adjourn earlier than was planned, no decisions were made on the motion.
Now we can see here that Zhou Enlai, in the February 7, 1929, letter, appears to be rescinding this order from the Central Committee. However, in the coming months, we are going to see this idea come back up. You might remember from earlier episodes that the general secretary of the Communist Party, Xiang Zhongfa, was a relatively ineffectual figure. So, while Xiang was formally the top party leader, in reality, Zhou Enlai and another leading Communist, Li Lisan, were in a contest with each other for practical leadership of the party throughout 1929 and up until April 1930. Li Lisan started to get the upper hand in June 1929, and ultimately took control in April 1930 when Zhou Enlai went to Moscow. When academic historians discuss this period, it’s common for them to refer to Zhou Enlai as representing more moderate policies and Li Lisan as being more radical, although, as some of them admit, that is something of an oversimplification of the issues.
Anyways, even though the idea didn’t originate with him, Li Lisan became a fan of this idea of using the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom as a model for the Red Army, and strongly encouraged Mao to take up this way of organizing the army. Mao came to characterize this as the ideology of roving rebel bands. Mao highlights the way in which this conception of the Red Army downplays the political tasks of the Army in a resolution that he drafted for a congress of communist party members in the Fourth Red Army in December 1929 (part of this resolution later appeared as the document “Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party” in Mao’s Selected Works).
Here’s what Mao wrote:
MRP3 206-207
So, this gives us some context for what Zhou Enlai is referring to here when he says that “you must never follow the ways of the army of the Taiping Rebellion” in his letter, and why this is significant as a major issue that is going to come back up in terms of how part of the Communist leadership conceptualized the role of the Red Army.
Now, let’s finish up Zhou’s letter:
Finish with Zhou letter
So, the order for Mao and Zhu to leave the army is the really big thing in this final section of the letter. What is going on here?
Zhou Enlai makes the request somewhat diplomatically, as is his style of doing things. He gives some good reasons (or at least pretexts) for why Mao and Zhu might come to Shanghai. He says that the Center will benefit from Mao and Zhu’s experience. He says that the absence of Mao and Zhu will make the Red Army less of a target for the enemy. This would be an important consideration, especially if the army were now dispersed across the countryside because of the new orders that he had just given earlier in the letter. And he pleads with Mao and Zhu not to be emotional about the issue. But it is hard to escape the feeling that the main reason that Zhou wanted Mao and Zhu to go to Shanghai was so that the Party Center could attempt to exercise more direct control over the Red Army. This issue of the Party Center exercising control over Mao and Zhu, or at least over the army that they built, is going to be another recurring theme over the next few years (and, as we have already seen in previous episodes, for example with the Hunan Provincial Committee’s attempts to exercise authority over the Fourth Red Army in 1928, this has actually already become an ongoing theme).
After all, earlier in the letter Zhou expressed his suspicions that Mao and Zhu were already insubordinate to the Central Committee when he wrote that “either you did not receive this instruction or you are not willing to follow it.” Zhou just does not seem confident that Mao and Zhu are going to follow instructions. And, as we will see with Mao’s reply of April 5, 1929, he had good reason.
We’ll pick things up again next episode with Mao’s very substantial reply.