Mao’s April 5, 1929 reply to Zhou Enlai.
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
David Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic
Tony Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party
Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work
Some names from this episode:
Zhou Enlai, head of the Organization Department of the Central Committee
Xiang Zhongfa, General secretary of the CP
Guo Fengming, bandit turned Guomindang local despot in Changting
Liu Shiyi, Guomindang commander
Ye Ting, Communist military leader
He Long, Communist military leader
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 115 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
Last episode, we discussed Zhou Enlai’s letter to Mao Zedong and Zhu De, in which Zhou gave some orders regarding how the Fourth Red Army should dispose of its forces (he specifically ordered Mao to disperse the army) and in which he also ordered Mao and Zhu to go to Shanghai and leave behind the army that they had built. This episode, I want to discuss Mao’s reply to Zhou of April 5, 1929.
This letter, which is formally a letter from the Front Committee to the Central Committee (and so not officially a letter from Mao to Zhou), is an extremely important document in Communist Party history. Substantial parts of the letter are reproduced in Mao’s letter to Lin Biao of January 5, 1930, parts of which later were included in Mao’s Selected Works as the document “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire.” And this April 5, 1929 letter was included in the document collection that was put together in Yan’an in 1941 titled After the Sixth Party Congress, and as such was part of the key set of materials studied within the Party during the process through which Mao established his ideological leadership, beginning with a campaign to study party history (and in particular the history of inner party debates over key aspects of revolutionary strategy and policy more broadly, in other words, the history of what is called line struggle within the party). And then this campaign to study party history led into the Rectification Campaign of 1942-1944, which established Mao’s ideological leadership of the Party.
So, let’s look at this letter, beginning with the very long opening paragraph.
MRP3 153-154
Here, Mao engages the letter on the level of overall line and strategy. And he repeatedly gives lip service to the overall line as articulated by the central committee while indicating his own disagreements as if they were simply complementary aspects of the same line, or corrections to unfortunate misinterpretations of what is certainly the party and Comintern’s correct overall line.
In particular, we see here in incipient form an articulation of Mao’s conception of what proletarian leadership of the Chinese Revolution means, as opposed to the Central Committee’s view. As we know, at the time, the Central Committee saw the Party’s main task as rebuilding the Party’s influence within urban areas among the industrial working class and recruiting large numbers of industrial workers into the party. While the Party had made some remarkable gains among urban workers before the Guomindang turned on the Communists in 1927, since then repression had largely wiped out the party’s worker membership. Mao, on the other hand, didn’t see a problem with there being vastly more peasants involved in the revolution, and even with the rural struggle being much more dynamic than the urban struggle, so long as, ultimately, this struggle was being ‘led by the working class,’ or, meaning the same thing, ‘under proletarian leadership.’
Now, what ‘proletarian leadership’ meant concretely was of course a major question. Clearly, at this time, the Central Committee felt that this meant achieving some sort of critical mass of worker members of the Communist Party and placing them in leading positions in the party. We saw that this was a major concern at the Sixth Party Congress back in episode 106. And this was the major reason why the ineffectual Xiang Zhongfa was made general secretary at the end of that Congress. And this was also a major way in which the Soviet Union approached the question of establishing proletarian leadership, with the working-class background of, for example, Nikita Khruschev, who succeeded Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union in the 1950s, playing a key role in Khruschev’s rise in the Soviet leadership.
For Mao, ultimately, ‘proletarian leadership’ would come to mean the leading role of the ideas corresponding to the class interests of the proletariat as an international class, which meant that the role of concrete, actual, living workers was not as important as the ideas guiding the overall revolutionary process, no matter who was carrying out the actual revolutionary activities. Now, Mao doesn’t say that outright here, and I think at this time that he had not fully articulated this idea in his own mind (and let’s be clear, how to actually apply this idea in practice is much more complicated than stating it in the relatively simple terms that I just did here). But we can see Mao carefully articulating his disagreement with the dominant position in the Chinese Communist Party and in the Comintern in this opening paragraph of the April 5 letter.
OK, let’s see how Mao continues in this letter.
MRP3 154-156
So, in this second paragraph of the letter, Mao gives a concrete response to Zhou’s orders, indicating why they won’t work, based on the experience of the Red Army
He does it in a way that highly concentrates about a year and a half’s intense political and military experience and does so in a way that both expresses the concrete situation that Mao and Zhou are debating, and also expresses what are, I think, universal guidelines for how a Communist leadership might utilize the forces under its command, in both a military and political sense. And, as I mentioned just a second ago, he also articulates here for the first time in a major internal party communication what would turn out to be one of the guiding principles of guerrilla warfare in China and elsewhere.
In the next paragraph, Mao gives further concrete details on how the red army organized its work, moving back and forth between concentrating its forces to fight the enemy and dispersing to conduct political work and to mobilize the masses.
MRP3 156
We have, at this point, read almost the first half of the letter. Now, the letter goes on, and if you’re very interested in following the development of the Chinese revolutionary process in all its minutiae, it is definitely worth tracking it down and reading the whole thing. But for our purposes here, we’ve covered the bulk of the substance of Mao’s argument against Zhou’s order that the army reorganize itself in a dispersed form.
Now, as for the order that Mao and Zhu report to Shanghai, Mao dispenses with that in a very brief but also logical manner:
MRP3 156
So, in refusing to head off to Shanghai, and in refusing to carry out Zhou’s orders that he reorganize the Red Army, we see Mao once again defying direct orders from higher level party organs. Now, Mao makes very reasonable arguments against the orders that he was given. I think that it is indisputable that history has shown that Mao knew very much better what to do in developing the Red Army and in unfolding guerrilla warfare than anyone at the Party Center did.
But we also see Mao, once again, pushing against the limits of what could be considered acceptable behavior in the context of democratic centralist norms. These norms were conditioned by immediate political circumstances. When Zhou had given his orders, things had looked very bleak for the Communists in the Hunan-Jiangxi border region. But when Mao received the orders, he was riding high on a series of victories in the Jiangxi-Fujian border area, and he had enough political (and military) capital to make the case that the orders he had been given were wrong, and to have his argument listened to.
In fact, even before Mao’s letter reached the central committee in Shanghai, news of his victories had reached the party center and was causing Zhou Enlai to revise his views. During a meeting on April 4, Zhou Enlai commented that the order to remove Mao and Zhu from the Red Army leadership, while ‘correct in principle,’ should be reconsidered in light of the current reality. And on April 7 he sent out a new letter to Mao stating that if Mao and Zhu “could not come for the time being, the Central Committee would like to see the Front Committee send a capable comrade to discuss the matter.”
So, this issue of the Party Center finding some way of exercising more control over Mao is not going to go away. But for the time being, Mao and Zhu De will be free to attempt their plan for the Communist conquest of southern Jiangxi that Mao had laid out in his March 20 letter to the Central Committee that we discussed two episodes ago.
Alright, that’s where we will leave things for now.
And just a short update on what I have been up to. I have been going back and forth between working on this Communism in World History textbook that I am writing and working on future episodes of this podcast. In going back and reading a bunch of stuff on Karl Marx for that chapter of the textbook, I found a book that I think people who listen to this podcast would really enjoy. I’m sure that some of you already found this book long before I did, but for those of you who haven’t heard about it yet, I want to recommend checking out Michael Heinrich’s biography of Karl Marx, the first volume of which has been published in English by Monthly Review Press, titled Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society. It only takes Marx up through 1841, so I ended the book really wanting more very badly. But if you’re looking for a very dense and sympathetic biographical treatment of the very young Karl Marx and the world that he was moving in, I think you will really like the book.
Alright, that’s it for now, be well.