The Communists take the fortified city of Shanghang in southwestern Fujian.
Further reading and watching:
Agnes Smedley, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh [Zhu De]
The Battle for Dien Bien Phu
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
Some names from this episode:
Lin Biao, commander of the first column of the Fourth Red Army
Lu Hanmin, Guomindang militarist
Liu Angong, special envoy sent by Party Center to the Fourth Red Army
Episode artwork: Aerial view of modern Shanghang
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 121 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
Last episode, we discussed the Party Center’s intervention in the dispute between Zhu De and Mao Zedong about the role of party leadership in the Red Army, and about what sort of political role that Red Army soldiers should be playing beyond their role in fighting the civil war. And, as a result of the Party Center’s intervention, we ended with Mao being asked back to take up his old position as secretary of the Front Committee, which was the overall leadership of the Communist Party and Red Army in the areas where the Fourth Red Army was operating, and Mao Zedong and Zhu De were reconciled.
Before we move our narrative forward and discuss how Mao resumed his leadership position and what steps he took to move forward, I want to take a step back and look at a major military event that took place while Mao was suffering from malaria and, in any case, had been sidelined from army leadership. One of the real strengths of Zhu De’s memoirs, as told to Agnes Smedley in Yan’an in 1937, is in the vivid descriptions that Zhu gives of particular episodes from the civil war. (The memoir has a number of predictable weaknesses, because it relied on the memory of someone whose life had essentially involved moving from one battle to the next for over a decade, and so there are a lot of mistakes on precise details. But Zhu De’s memoirs really come to life in some of these accounts, and one gets the impression that even if he doesn’t always remember the correct date for when something happened, or even always the correct order of events, that he does capture the essence of what happened during some dramatic moments in the struggle.)
So, you might remember from last episode that, after the Fourth Red Army captured the city of Shanghang, in southwestern Fujian province, the Communist Party held the Eighth Party Congress of the 4th Red Army there. Now, as we discussed in the last episode, that Congress of party members working in the army was not a very successful one. But part of the reason why that Congress was held in the first place, aside from the need to periodically have meetings where you sum up what you have done and make new plans, is because of the significance of the taking of that city (which is why it was enough of a nodal point in the struggle at that time that it was necessary to take a moment for the conference to sum up what had been accomplished and make new plans). So, since Zhu De gives a nice account of the taking of Shanghang in his memoirs, let’s take a moment and talk about the battle for Shanghang.
The Shanghang County seat is usually just known as Shanghang but is also called Linjiang. I’m just going to follow the convention and refer to it as Shanghang. Shanghang was a fortified city (not unlike Changting, whose capture we discussed in episode 110). And although the Communists had basically taken over the countryside surrounding the city by the late summer of 1929, the city of Shanghang had strong walls, and also was bordered on three sides by a wide river. I’ve included an aerial photo of modern-day Shanghang as the episode art to give you an idea of how the river makes a horseshoe around the city on the north, east, and south sides. There was a strip of land between the river and the city walls, and the city had gates for entering and exiting the city on the east, north, south, and west sides. But because the Communists had taken over the countryside around the city, the northern, southern, and eastern gates had been closed up and reinforced with sandbags, while the western gate was only opened for a few hours a day to allow traffic to go in and out, and it was heavily guarded. The city was home to the wealthier landlords from the region, and in addition to Guomindang troops the landlord militias had retreated into the city and were holed up there as well. So, the city was not only fortified with strong walls, but also had a lot of defenders.
The Communists were able to conduct a pretty thorough reconnaissance of the city and its defenses, because many local peasants had joined the Red Guards, which was the Communist militia organization. So, they knew that an attack was expected to come from the west, toward the one city gate that was still functioning. Zhu De had no intention of giving the enemy what they had prepared for and came up with a different plan. His plan was to attack during the night by sending Lin Biao with a regiment to the southern wall to attack with mortars, which was supposed to draw the bulk of the enemy forces to that side of the city, while Zhu De took the main force of Red Army troops and Red Guards to scale the walls on the northern side of the city and gain entry before the enemy realized what was happening.
During the day before the assault was to take place (this was in mid-September 1929), Zhu De set up his command post on a wooded hill overlooking the city from the north. He and his command staff went over the coming night’s operation by making drawings in the dust on the ground while he was able to watch the Guomindang soldiers washing themselves and their clothes in the river below Hidden in the woods on the hillside, Red Army soldiers and peasants sawed away at bamboo stalks making ladders for the assault that night, totally invisible to the Guomindang soldiers below them in the river.
The scene that Zhu De paints here reminds me of another, much more famous episode in a different war. There is a really good documentary about the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the battle at which the Vietnamese Communists decisively defeated the French in 1954, using the protracted people’s war strategy (and many associated tactics) developed by Mao and Zhu De earlier in China. Anyways, this documentary has a lot of great footage showing how the Vietnamese forces surrounded the French in the valley below them. I found a copy of it on YouTube after a little searching, and I’ll include a link in the show notes. So, this account by Zhu De of gathering large numbers of troops and carrying out extensive preparations for investing the city of Shanghang invisibly up in the hills above the city where they could keep an eye on the enemy without being noticed reminded me a lot of parts of this documentary on Dien Bien Phu.
OK, let’s turn to Zhu De’s account of the taking of Shanghang:
Smedley 265-266
One thing that strikes me in this account is the close cooperation of Lin Biao and Zhu De. Just a few episodes ago, when we were discussing Mao’s June 14, 1929, letter to Lin Biao, it was clear from context that the letter that Lin Biao had written to Mao and which Mao was replying to had included some fairly hard words about Zhu De, and based on what we know of the arguments that were happening in the Red Army at the time, it’s also likely that Zhu De had expressed some similarly hard words about Lin Biao. But, despite their political differences and the unkind words that had been expressed, they were able to continue working together. There are plenty of political relationships in the history of international communism where that doesn’t happen, and so it stands out to me that this was the case here.
In the areas where the Communists were creating their new base areas in Jiangxi and Fujian in 1929, the peasants had begun creating a new type of song, which they called new ballads, which were songs with political content related to the revolution. The capture of Shanghang gave rise to a song, called the Ballad of Shanghang, which went like this (I’ll just read it out, I can’t sing it):
Smedley 263-264
Despite the significance of the initial capture of Shanghang, the Communists were only able to hold onto it for a short amount of time. In late October, Mao Zedong and the rest of the Western Fujian Special Committee, which had been using Shanghang as their headquarters since the end of the 8th Party Congress of the 4th Red Army, retreated in the face of an oncoming offensive by Guomindang troops, once again following the strategy of ceding territory in order to fight later under more favorable conditions (following 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.”). It was very difficult for the Communists to hold cities while following this strategy, unless those cities were deep within territory that they controlled. As it happened, Shanghang would change hands multiple times between the Communists and the Guomindang.
After taking Shanghang, Zhu De was emboldened to try and push for further conquests and pushed west across the border into northeastern Guangdong province. This offensive may have had a particular emotional weight for Zhu De because this was the area where he was defeated at the end of the Southern Expedition (which we discussed in episode 71). He may well have wanted to redeem the loss from two years earlier, but instead the Fourth Red Army was defeated and turned back in very fierce fighting, and lost hundreds of men. This is actually where Liu Angong was killed. I know last episode I said he was killed in fighting in western Fujian, but actually it was in this fighting just across the border from Fujian. Zhu De felt for the loss of his friend.
Ironically, the army that defeated Zhu De in northeastern Guangdong was the Nineteenth Route Army. In just a few years, the 19th Route Army is going to gain a reputation as very staunch and patriotic troops, because of their fierce resistance to the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1932. Then, after becoming standard bearers of a sort for Chinese nationalism, in 1933 they are going to become the main force in a mutiny against Chiang Kai-shek called the Fujian Rebellion and are going to then seek an alliance with the Chinese Communists. Anyways, this defeat at the hands of the 19th Route Army is going to convince the Fourth Red Army to remain on the Fujian side of the border with Guangdong for the time being, although Zhu De did end up leaving two companies of volunteers behind to aid local guerrilla forces.
After retreating to the north from his defeat, in an area on Guangdong-Jiangxi border, Zhu De ran into a force of Communist partisans who were able to guide the Fourth Red Army to a place where they could rest and recuperate. The core of this Communist guerrilla force was composed of 200 Red Army veterans who had escaped from the Jinggangshan with Mao and Zhu back in January 1929 (in episode 108), but who were left behind because they were sick and wounded and couldn’t go on. They had been left with their rifles and a small amount of ammunition and tasked with organizing a guerrilla force based on the local peasantry when they had recovered. And that is what they had done.
From here, Zhu and the main force of the Fourth Army made their way back into western Fujian, where his story rejoins where we left off last episode, with his and Mao’s reconciliation.
One interesting thing to note about how this period is recounted in Zhu’s memoirs (as told by Agnes Smedley), is that, while the dispute with Mao is not mentioned, there is a very brief allusion to it, although it would only be caught by people who knew what had happened. It would have been very unusual if the dispute between Zhu and Mao had made it into the memoir, those sorts of divisions are not at all what you would expect to see discussed in a manuscript that was written before the Communists had even seized power. Even to this day, aspects of the dispute between Mao and Zhu are considered secret and the relevant documents can only be read by Communist Party historians, so it’s no surprise that the dispute doesn’t make it into a manuscript mainly written during the 1940s.
Yet, right at the end of the chapter, Smedley includes a line from Zhu De’s wife commenting on his character that goes like this: “perhaps his greatest qualities were his tenacious loyalty and personal integrity and his lack of political ambitions—qualities that enabled him to subordinate himself to the civilian authority of the party which guided the army.” It seems clear to me that Agnes Smedley knew about this struggle that had taken place between Zhu and Mao, and that’s not a huge surprise. Smedley had applied (and been rejected) for membership in the Chinese Communist Party during her time in Yan’an, and she had organized dance parties during her time there, which led to her socializing regularly with most of the leading Communists. Zhu De, by the way, is rumored to have danced like he was marching in formation. So, it’s not a huge surprise that she knew about this struggle. But it really seems to me like she included this little line here as a kind of wink for readers who know what happened, sort of an easter egg.
Anyways, I think that’s it for this episode. Until next time, be well.