The conquest of Yudu, Xingguo, Ningdu, Longyan, and Yongding counties by the Fourth Red Army. Zhu De reminisces. Also, poetry.
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
Peng Dehuai, Memoirs of a Chinese Marshall
Agnes Smedley, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh [Zhu De]
Joseph Fewsmith, Forging Leninism in China: Mao and the Remaking of the Chinese Communist Party, 1927–1934
Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893-1937 (毛泽东年谱)
Some names from this episode:
Zhou Enlai, head of the Organization Department of the Central Committee
Peng Dehuai, leader of the Fifth Red Army
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 116 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
In our last few episodes, we discussed how the Communist armies led by Peng Dehuai and Mao Zedong reunited with each other in Ruijin on April 1, 1929. We also discussed the guidance sent by Zhou Enlai on behalf of the Central Committee to Mao Zedong and Zhu De which reached them shortly after their arrival in Ruijin, and the way in which Mao forcefully (and ultimately successfully) argued against this guidance in his reply. We also discussed Mao’s plan to wage guerrilla war broadly across southern Jiangxi and western Fujian in order to take advantage of the war that had broken out between the Guomindang and the Guangxi warlords, which meant that Guomindang armies had left the scene for the moment, ignoring the Communists and focusing on what seemed like the greater threat.
Mao was so stoked on this war between the Guomindang and the Guangxi warlords, and the way in which this facilitated the creation of a soviet area encompassing large parts of southern Jiangxi and western Fujian, that in the Autumn of 1929 he wrote a poem called “The War between Chiang Kai-shek and the Guangxi Warlords.” It goes like this:
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“Yellow millet dream” means something like “pipe dream” in English.
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Just a reminder, “Ting river” here refers to the conquest of Changting, which we discussed in episodes 110 and 111.
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Longyan and Shanghang are counties in Fujian which were captured by the Communists in May and June 1929.
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And here, ‘golden cup’ is a symbol for the territorial integrity of China. Mao and other Communists felt that it was only where they were able to set up Soviet areas where some small part of the real China could then shine through. Everywhere else, China had been diminished by imperialist domination and the corruption of the Chinese ruling elite.
And then the poem ends with:
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Here, since I had some many clarifying notes on such a short poem, I’ll read through it one more time without making any side comments.
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And, like I said, this poem was written a few months after we last left off, but before we go back to April 1929, and see what Mao was getting up to, I want to address a question some of you probably have.
In hindsight, of course, we know that the Communists are going to run Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland of China after another 20 years of nearly constant fighting. But at the time, Chiang didn’t know this, or maybe he would have prioritized fighting the Communists rather than the Guangxi warlord clique. So, just for comparison’s sake, how much more formidable did the Guangxi warlord armies appear to Chiang than the Communists’ forces in Jiangxi?
In a letter that Mao wrote on June 14, 1929, he gave the number of soldiers in the Fourth Army as “somewhat more than 4,000.” In contrast, the Guangxi warlords had about 60,000 troops under their command. So, even though we know that Chiang Kai-shek is ultimately going to lose to the Communists, it does not seem unreasonable given the troop numbers involved that the Guangxi warlords seemed the larger threat from Chiang Kai-shek’s perspective at the time.
Ok, so let’s look at what Mao was up to in April, May and June of 1929.
This was a period in which the Communists made some rapid advances in establishing their control over parts of southern Jiangxi and western Fujian, but some conflicts that had been brewing within the Communist Party also began to find sharp expression.
First, let’s talk about the Communist expansion, and then, probably next episode, we’ll talk about the big conflict that arose between Mao and Zhu De.
On April 8, the Red Army left Ruijin and marched west into Yudu. This was the first of several counties that the Red Army would sweep through over the next month, and one of three where it was able to set up a new county-level revolutionary governing authority. In his memoirs, Peng Dehuai remembered the march from Ruijin to Yudu in a way that might help you to think more concretely about what this march looked like on the ground, as well as a political lesson that he took from an interaction with Mao Zedong on the march:
Peng 251
On April 11 in Yudu, a big leadership meeting was held where it was decided that Peng Dehuai would lead his troops back to the Jinggangshan in order to help to restore the base area there, and they took off on April 14. Not long after that, Mao and Zhu led their troops north to take Xingguo, which was not too far south from the Donggu base area. For much of the second half of April, Mao turned his attention to the role that land reform would play in construction of the new soviet state in southern Jiangxi and western Fujian. He set up a miniature peasant organizing training institute in Xingguo and taught the main courses on peasant organizing and carrying out land reform for a little over 40 cadres.
One of the results of this focus was the creation of a land reform law for the new county-level soviet government.
Back in December 1928 Mao had drafted a land law for the Jinggangshan which was adopted as law there and which reflected how the land reform process there had been carried out. In 1941, in a work that he published which can be translated as Rural Investigations or Rural Surveys in English, which mainly consisted of a collection of detailed rural investigations that Mao had conducted during the early 1930s, Mao also reviewed the party’s history of carrying out land reform and included some comments on the early land laws that he wrote. Mao’s comments here give us some insight into the learning process, as well as the political compromises, that went into these early land laws. Here is what Mao had to say about that first, December 1928 Jinggangshan land law:
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So, to highlight a few salient points about this first land law that Mao drafted, back in the Jinggangshan at the end of 1928:
As Mao mentioned in this quote, the perspective taken here was essentially the nationalization of the land by the soviet government and then its redistribution for use by the peasants. In the Xingguo land law that Mao drafted in April 1929, this was changed to confiscating all public land and all land belonging to landlords. This was the main substantive change made between the December 1928 Jinggangshan Land Law and the April 1929 Xingguo Land Law, because the Communists realized that the peasants were not going to react well to having their land confiscated by the state, even if it was immediately given back to them to use (but not to legally own any longer) (and even if that land was now larger because it included land confiscated from landlords).
But as Mao mentioned in the quote from 1941 that I read, there were some other important elements to both the Jinggangshan and Xingguo land laws that the Communists would later sum up as being wrong. One of the most important of these was the issue of whether land should be distributed to the peasants based on how much capacity any given peasant household had to work the land (in terms of tools, livestock, and the number of working age people who were in the household), or whether land should be redistributed on a strict per capita basis, with larger households getting more land, even if they did not have the same capacity to work the land as a smaller household which had more working age people and good tools and animals for working the land.
As we discussed in episode 88, when we talked about how these issues came up during the Summer of 1928 land revolution in the Jinggangshan, the argument in favor of land distribution according to the power to work the land hinged on the fact that it would lead to a more efficient and productive use of the land, which would benefit the overall economy and well-being of the base area. The power to work the land would be determined by some combination of age, gender, and possession of tools and draft animals. That would perhaps be a bit cumbersome to determine, but it made more sense, according to this argument, than giving land to children, the elderly, women with bound feet who couldn’t engage in agricultural labor, and so on.
The argument in favor of per capita land distribution was principally that this was more egalitarian, with the additional benefit of being administratively much easier than trying to rank everyone according to their ability to work the land and then doling out land amounts of varying sizes according to some sort of ‘power to work the land score.’ The problem with giving out land to people who couldn’t work it was effectively dismissed by indicating that in practice children, the elderly, women with bound feet, and whoever else couldn’t work the land were almost always connected with people who could work the land. So, this wasn’t as big of an issue as it was made out to be by the proponents of distributing land according to the power to work the land.
But the most important issue for the proponents of per capita land distribution, including Mao, was that distributing land according to the power to work the land would preserve more of the inequality that already prevailed. Even when the better off peasants and small landlords had some or even much of their land taken away, they retained other advantages. They had better tools and seed stock and had more and better draft animals. So, the decision to favor per capita land distribution ultimately came down to prioritizing a more egalitarian distribution of land, at the expense of what may have been a somewhat better economic outcome for the base area in the short term. It is interesting that here, even at basically the first point where the Chinese Communist Party had to make a decision about how to reshape society in an area that it governed, the contradiction came up between prioritizing economic outcomes and prioritizing egalitarian values in social reconstruction. This would be one of the main contradictions that characterized the policy choices of the entire period of socialist construction that began in 1949 and which engendered conflicts within the Communist Party between the partisans of egalitarianism and the partisans of development at any cost.
As it happened, back during the land reform of the summer of 1928 in the Jinggangshan, the land reform was carried out on a per capita basis. But in the law that was passed in December 1928 and also in the April 1929 Xingguo Land Law, there was a major hedge inserted against the per capita distribution of land.
Here is how the relevant section was worded in the Jinggangshan Land Law:
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And the Xingguo Land Law, four months later, re-used the exact same language.
Now, just reading this, you would think that the per capita basis of land redistribution had prevailed, at least as the primary form of redistribution. However, based on what Mao wrote in 1941, and this may have been hard to follow without having the text in front of you, when Mao wrote that “A decision was therefore taken in this sense [that is, in favor of per capita distribution of land], but afterward this was changed and only the latter method was used.” The latter method being distribution according to the power of any given household to work the land.
In practice, then, the insertion of a clause in the land law allowing for the use of labor power to be the criterion for land distribution “in places where special circumstances prevail” is going to end up allowing those who favor that as the basis for land distribution to just decide that special circumstances prevail in all circumstances. Anyways, as we can see, 12 years later Mao is going to sum this up as an error.
Now, this way of doing things isn’t going to stand unchanged until the collapse of the Jiangxi Soviet. There are going to be some major changes in the land laws of the Jiangxi Soviet over the next few years, but this is where things stood in April 1928, and we’ll look at the changes that come down the pipe when we get to them.
At the end of April, Mao and Zhu led the army east from Xingguo to take the city of Ningdu. In episode 109, when the Red Army first captured the Ningdu county seat in mid-February, the Guomindang garrison fled in advance of the Red Army. But now, the Red Army encountered a stronger force defending the city. Zhu De relates some things about the campaign through southern Jiangxi in April and the capture of Ningdu in the biography that Agnes Smedley wrote about him:
Smedley 256-260
So, with the conquest of the Ningdu county seat, the Communists proceeded once again to set up institutions of soviet government in the area, just as they had done earlier in the month in Yudu and Xingguo. In mid-May, the fighting between the Guangxi warlords and Chiang Kai-shek ended for the time being, and the Guomindang armies that had been in Jiangxi before that war returned to the area. With the increased pressure from Guomindang armies in Jiangxi, Mao and Zhu decided to move their main force into western Fujian to continue conquering territory where the Guomindang was weak.
On May 23, the Red Army marched in and took the Longyan county seat in Fujian. In this battle, they wiped out a battalion of the local Guomindang warlord’s forces, but in order to lure in his main force, the Communists withdrew from the city and marched south and captured the Yongding county seat on May 25. Then, they returned to Longyan on June 3 to annihilate the main force of the local Guomindang warlord’s army, which they had lured in with their initial retreat from the city. So, where things stood in early June was that a very large territory stretching from southern Jiangxi through much of western Fujian had been conquered over the course of two months and new soviet institutions set up to carry out land reform and govern these areas.
During this period of rapid expansion, as I mentioned earlier in this episode. A major dispute broke out between Mao Zedong and Zhu De. I’ll talk some about that next episode. Until then, be well.