We continue our close reading of Mao’s letter to Lin Biao. In this episode, Mao discusses the roving rebel band mentality and the organizational state of affairs in the army, party, and mass organizations.
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
Agnes Smedley, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh [Zhu De]
Mao Zedong, “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party”
Some names from this episode:
Liu Angong, special envoy sent by Party Center to the Fourth Red Army
Yang Sen, Sichuan warlord
Zhu Yunqing, chief political advisor to the Fourth Red Army
Episode artwork: photo of Zhu Yunqing
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 118 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
Last episode we began our discussion of the line struggle between Mao Zedong and Zhu De over the meaning of party control over the communist armed forces, and also the difference between party leadership vs. individual leadership. We’re going to pick up this episode directly where we left off last episode, by doing a close reading of Mao’s June 14, 1929, letter to Lin Biao, which we began last episode. If you haven’t already listened to the last episode, I strongly recommend that you go back and listen to it before you listen to this one. Ok, here we go:
[MRP3 182]
A couple things to comment on in this paragraph. First, we see again Mao’s admiration for the party control of the armed forces in the Donggu base area, which is where the Second and Fourth Regiments that Mao refers to here were based.
Also, while we already know that this whole polemic is aimed at Zhu De and Liu Angong, there is something in this paragraph which it would be easy to miss if you don’t know the personal history of Zhu and Liu. If you listened to our series of episodes on Zhu De’s background, you know that Zhu was formerly a leading officer in a warlord army in Sichuan. So, you might just think that Mao is referring to that past when he talks about the ‘cliquism left over from warlord armies.’ Well, Mao is referring to that, but there is more to it than that. You see, when Liu Angong came back from training as an electrical engineer in Europe, which, as we noted last episode, is where he first met Zhu De and where he joined the Communist Party, he went back to Sichuan, where he ended up working on the staff of the warlord governor of Sichuan, Yang Sen. This was a position where he had to keep his communist allegiance secret.
Anyways, Yang Sen was one of the Sichuanese warlords that Zhu De had been associated with before he decided to go to Europe and stop being a warlord (as we discussed back in episodes 79 and 80). Then, in 1926, after coming back to China when he got thrown out of Germany, one of Zhu’s first assignments was to go and try to persuade Yang Sen to throw his support behind the Northern Expedition. Yang Sen colluded with another warlord to betray Zhu De, but Liu Angong warned Zhu De about it and helped him to escape. Liu Angong also managed to get a group of Yang Sen’s troops to desert the warlord and join the National Revolutionary Army. So, as you can see, it would be understandable that there may have been a bond formed between Liu Angong and Zhu De at this time, with Liu having saved his life, and then later going on to serve under Zhu De during the Nanchang Uprising. Anyways, despite the fact that Zhu De and Liu Angong never served together in the warlord armies of Sichuan (and Liu Angong only served in those armies as a clandestine communist operative), Mao is taking advantage of the past association of Zhu De and Liu Angong with the Sichuan warlord Yang Sen to paint their current alliance (and it seems friendship) as a remnant of ‘warlord cliquism.’ Which it may well have been on an ideological level. But this common past would have been known to many people reading this letter (which was sent not just to Lin Biao, but also to the Front Committee so that it could be read more broadly), and so to fully grasp how Mao is criticizing Zhu De and Liu Angong here, I wanted to share this history that they had together with you.
Ok, let’s move on with this letter.
[MRP3 182-183]
This is the main paragraph in this letter where Mao raises his criticism of what he calls the ‘roving rebel band mentality.’ In this paragraph Mao doesn’t fully get into the topic, but he raises some telling points that I want to expand on. Later in 1929, in a document that was printed in Mao’s Selected Works as “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party” but which originally was part of a resolution from the Fourth Red Army’s Ninth Congress, Mao gives what is probably his most well-known discussion of the ‘roving rebel band mentality.’ I’ll include a link in the show notes to that document, but we will also discuss it when we get up to December 1929 in our narrative. But this idea of a ‘roving rebel mentality’ is important in Maoist discourse even beyond Mao as a way of discussing militaristic political lines that overemphasize military affairs at the expense of mass work. For example, it plays a key role in the criticisms that Maoists would make of political forces following focoist and urban guerrilla strategies starting in the 1960s.
In this paragraph, Mao is speaking more about the social basis within the Red Army for emphasizing the military at the expense of the political, rather than directly criticizing Zhu De’s particular political line. Zhu De certainly did support the idea of forming base areas, for example (although one wonders if Mao’s reference here to superficial unity on that question isn’t meant to include Zhu De as well). But mainly, I think that here Mao is speaking to this question of the social background of many of the Red Army soldiers. We spent some time discussing this back in episode 98, which was titled “Vagrants, Mercenaries, and Rich Peasants,” and I don’t want to repeat that whole discussion here.
One of the main manifestations of this difference between the overly militaristic emphasis of some comrades in the Red Army, as Mao mentions here, was that they tended to see base areas more as temporary bases of operations, kind of like expanded bandit lairs, if you will, rather than as places to set up what was essentially a proto-state that it was hoped would continue growing and eventually swallow up the old semi-feudal, semi-colonial Chinese state. As Mao says here, this was one of the major, ongoing struggles in the old Jinggangshan base area, and one concrete form that this took was on the question of whether it was worthwhile or not to distribute guns from the army to the local militias, which would imply a greater commitment on the Communists’ part to setting down roots in the base area.
That said, this is a problem that I don’t think is as black-and-white as Mao paints it here. One of the key elements of the revolutionary military strategy that Mao and Zhu De were pioneering involved using highly mobile armed forces which would cede territory to superior reactionary forces with the hopes of later on utilizing superior mobility, popular support, and knowledge of the area in order to come back and confront the reactionary armed forces under more favorable conditions. This strategy was captured in the Mao and Zhu’s maxim that “The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.” We discussed Mao and Zhu jointly formulating this approach back in episode 87. Anyways, this strategy necessarily implied that Mao and Zhu were going to let the enemy overrun at least parts of their territory sometimes and, when that happened, the Guomindang would carry out a destructive white terror in those places. As we discussed several times during our episodes on the Jinggangshan base area, this meant that the Communists had to seriously consider just what sort of resources they would spend on consolidation in areas that they knew would likely be overrun again by the Guomindang at some point in the future.
Continuing with the letter:
[MRP3 183]
This is the only place where I’ve seen a reference to people actually upholding the move into Southern Hunan that led to the August Defeat (which we discussed in episodes 93 and 94). It’s kind of hard to imagine this being put forward as a serious position (and Mao seems incredulous here). If I had to speculate, I would assume that the arguments got so fierce that some people got angry and decided to defend some pretty dumb things. But that’s just speculation on my part, since I can’t find any more information on exactly who jumped out and said this stuff, and in what context that argument was apparently made.
Continuing with the letter:
[MRP3 183-184]
I don’t think there is a lot to clarify or give context for in these last two paragraphs.
This guy who Mao mentions here, Zhu Yunqing, is a very interesting guy, who we haven’t talked about before. At this time, his position was chief political advisor to the Fourth Army, and he had played a number of leading roles in the Jinggangshan base area, including being commander of the 31st Regiment, which was the regiment made up at its core of troops from Mao’s Autumn Harvest Uprising, and being one of the military commanders at the battle of Huangyangjie (which you might remember from episode 94). He was a graduate of the Whampoa military academy and was recognized by everyone as being a very talented military officer. He was also, at the time of the events in this episode, just 22 years old, which is a reminder of just how young the vast majority of the people who were involved in these events were. Mao, who was 35, and Zhu De, who was 42, would have seemed as old and wise elders to the vast majority even of the senior officers of the Red Army. And maybe the young age of the vast majority of the people involved here does give some useful context to the frustrations that Mao vents in the excerpt that I just read.
Alright, now Mao moves on to point 5 in his letter. It’s kind of long, but I’m going to read the whole thing together, mainly because I won’t have a lot to add to it, and also because we talked about a lot of the issues involved here last episode. I’m tempted to skip this section entirely, but I think it does give some sense of how the Red Army, the Communist Party, and the various mass organizations associated with the Party were functioning. And indeed, it seems clear from what Mao is saying here that, while the distinctions between the various organizations were clear in his own mind, they were not in the minds of many other people in and around the Party and Army. Ok, this is a long excerpt, and then I’ll say a few more words about it after I read it:
[MRP3 184-187]
As I said in my preamble to reading this long excerpt, I don’t have a lot to add, and I mainly read it all out so that you could just get a sense of some of how things were functioning.
It’s interesting to compare this bit of the letter to Lin Biao to Mao’s October 1928 “Draft Resolution of the 2nd Congress of the [County] Party Organizations in the Hunan-Jiangxi Border Area,” just eight months earlier. As we discussed in episode 96, in that document Mao gave a self-critical discussion about how committees were actually functioning, as opposed to how they were supposed to be functioning, and even how this sometimes meant that Mao himself was a one-person Front Committee. As I pointed out back in episode 96, there were always a million tasks to be carried out, under very dangerous and chaotic conditions. And with the shortage of capable party cadre available for work the tendency was for anyone who could do the work to be given a portfolio of tasks which pushed the limits of what any one person could do. In practice, this meant setting aside many of the organizational norms that the party was, on paper, supposed to follow in its functioning.
Now, eight months later, in this letter to Lin Biao, Mao is taking a different tack, and, aside from recognizing the way in which a shortage of qualified personnel continued to result in a small number of cadres holding a lot of posts concurrently in different party, army, and mass organizations, Mao is writing as if many of the issues that he criticized himself for in October 1928 had been overcome. Clearly, his critics disagreed, but also it seems that they were criticizing Mao because they disagreed with his politics, not because of the organizational issues that they were raising in order to attack him. If that’s true, that would make their criticisms basically opportunistic in character and would make Mao’s defensiveness on issues that he was earlier openly self-critical about more understandable. And it does seem from how Mao is writing here that he felt that there had been major progress on many of the problems that he discussed in the October 1928 resolution.
Alright, I’m going to wrap up this episode here. Next episode, we’ll finish our discussion of the June 14 letter to Lin Biao and move on to discuss how the issues here were decided on by the red army party congress that was held on June22.
Until then, be well.