We begin our close reading of Mao’s January 5, 1930 letter to Lin Biao.
Further reading:
Stuart Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power, vol. 3: From the Jinggangshan to the Establishment of the Jiangxi Soviets, July 1927-December 1930
Pang Xianzhi and Jin Chongji, Mao Zedong: A Biography, vol. 1: 1893-1949
David Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic
Mao Zedong, “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire”
Some names from this episode:
Lin Biao, commander of the first column of the Fourth Red Army
Li Lisan, leading Communist
He Long, leader of a soviet in the Hunan-Hubei border region
Li Wenlin, leader of Donggu base area
Fang Zhimin, leader of Northeastern Jiangxi soviet
Episode artwork:
Picture of a prairie fire (in Illinois)
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 134 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
This episode, we’re going back down to the countryside and picking up the story of Mao Zedong back where we left him in episode 125, when we concluded our discussion of the Gutian Resolution.
Since it’s been a little while, let’s refresh our memories about where we left things with Mao.
The Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the Fourth Red Army (also known interchangeably as the Gutian Congress or the Gutian Conference), which was held on December 28 and 29, 1929, marked a definitive turning point in the political development of the Red Army. As we have repeatedly discussed in past episodes of this podcast, since the Sanwan Reorganization of 1927, Mao had fought for a vision of how the army should function as a politically engaged weapon of the Communist Party, and the Gutian Congress marked the victory of Mao’s line on this question.
After the Gutian Conference ended, Mao was at a point where he needed to decide, as he put it, “how to appraise the current situation and how to settle the companion question of what action to take.” In the midst of Mao’s deliberations over the political situation and determining what actions to take, a letter of New Year’s greetings arrived from Lin Biao which helped to focus his thinking.
In this letter, Lin expressed a good deal of pessimism about the prospects for the revolution. He thought that for the Chinese Revolution to be successful, first the masses would have to be won over on a countrywide scale, and that only then could power be seized. And clearly, the party was far from even developing work with the masses in large parts of the country, much less winning them over, and had suffered huge reversals in places like Shanghai and Guangzhou where it had once been influential, because of severe repression. So what this letter from Lin showed Mao was that even some of the party cadre who he had most depended on and who tended to align themselves with Mao’s positions (for example, in the line struggle with Zhu De about how politicized the Red Army should be, as we discussed in episodes 117 and 118), even these guys didn’t necessarily grasp the strategy for the Chinese Revolution that Mao had begun articulating back in the Jinggangshan.
So Mao wrote a reply to Lin Biao on January 5, 1930. We’re going to go through the letter in some detail, because it went on to become, in a somewhat altered form, a major piece of the Maoist canon under the title “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire.” But to summarize some of the main points before we dive in here, what Mao does in this letter is he discusses how the strategy for the Chinese Revolution hinges on the role of the Red Army and the construction and expansion of base areas; how this process actually contributes to bringing about the ‘revolutionary high tide,’ in the language then current in the Comintern and in the Chinese Communist Party, meaning essentially, favorable conditions for rapidly building the revolutionary movement and perhaps making an attempt at seizing power; and then he makes some additional points where he goes into detail on how the Red Army should be used in this process, particularly expanding on the letter to Zhou Enlai that we discussed in episode 115 (and which is quoted at length in this letter to Lin Biao) on the issue of concentrating and dispersing army forces for different political and military tasks.
The thing is, for people who have been listening to this podcast, I’m not entirely sure that it’s really necessary for us to go into much depth on this document. On the one hand, this document is immensely important because in it Mao sums up a great deal about the revolutionary strategy that he had been formulating (and testing in practice) since the failure of the 1927 Autumn Harvest Uprising. But the thing is, we have been following Mao’s development of these ideas closely enough in this podcast that I don’t think anything in here is actually new. And for that reason, I almost decided to pass over this document very quickly.
But I have decided that I do want to look at the document in some depth for two reasons. First, it is an incredibly important historical document because of how it was used to educate both Chinese and later foreign revolutionaries about Mao’s breakthroughs in forming a Marxist theory of revolutionary warfare for the countryside of semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries. And second, because for the people who listen to these podcasts when they are released, it has been about a year since we talked about Mao and what he was doing, which I totally self-criticize myself for, that is way too long to go without checking in on Mao, and I’ll try to do better this year. So a little bit of review of some of Mao’s ideas won’t hurt us, especially in the concentrated form in which they appear in this letter to Lin Biao.
Before we start, just a word on how this document evolved over time, going from being a letter to Lin Biao to ‘A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire.’ It was included as it was originally written in the 1947 edition of Mao’s works, and it’s a translation of that edition that we are using in this podcast. Then, when another, bigger, collection of Mao’s works was being put together the next year, in 1948, Lin Biao complained to the Central Committee about reprinting the letter again when it was so critical of him. The Central Committee acceded to his request to suppress the letter. So, because the books had already been printed, the pages with this letter in it were cut out of the books, and the title was blotted out in the table of contents.
I have to imagine that this raised some questions among readers about what had been removed, although it’s important to remember that anyone studying Mao’s works at that time was reading them in a different context than most readers today. The reading of political texts in the Communist base areas and then after liberation in the People’s Republic of China was typically carried out in the context of a discussion group where there would be a responsible cadre whose task was to provide an orientation for the texts being discussed, to facilitate the discussion, and to give clarifying answers to questions about the text. Presumably, these cadres had some sort of explanation in hand about the redacted lines in the table of contents and the pages that had been cut out of the books.
In 1951, when another, more robust edition of Mao’s Selected Works was being put together, the letter was changed to remove all reference to Lin. It was only in the 1991 edition of Mao’s works that Lin was again indicated as the recipient of the letter. That said, the letter may have circulated as a document used in the political training of cadres before being collected in the 1947 edition of Mao’s works. In Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, David Apter and Tony Saich interviewed a former guerrilla who seems to indicate that he was familiar with the letter before first going to Yan’an in 1937. Certainly, given the prominence that the document later achieved in the circulation of Maoism internationally, it wouldn’t be surprising if it had earlier been widely used for training purposes in China before 1947.
So, with that bit of background under our belts, let’s go ahead and finally enter the year 1930 with Mao Zedong.
MRP3 234
May 18, 1929, would have been right in the midst of the events that we discussed in episode 116, so it is likely that this meeting that Mao is referring to was one at which the decision was taken to move the main force of the 4th Red Army into western Fujian. As we discussed at the time, this decision was made because the fighting between the Guangxi warlords and Chiang Kai-shek had ended for the time being (although it would later pick back up again), 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. The significance of this context should become apparent as we continue reading Mao’s letter and see the particular criticisms that he makes of Lin.
So, continuing with the letter:
MRP3 234-235
So, as I mentioned earlier, the translation we are working with here is based on the 1947 edition of Mao’s works, and in that edition, this word was redacted, but we can do some informed speculating on what that word was. Just to repeat, Mao wrote about Lin’s belief in the policy of [blank]-style guerrilla actions. My best guess is that the redacted word is Taiping, so it would have read Taiping-style guerrilla actions. Why do I think this? Because, as we discussed in episodes 114 and 124, Li Lisan and some others in the Party Center had been promoting the idea that that the Taiping revolutionaries (from back in episodes 3 and 4) had a form of military organization that was particularly well-suited to guerrilla warfare. Mao came to characterize this line as trying to win a revolution based on roving rebel bands, and back in episodes 114, 124 and elsewhere, we’ve discussed in some detail how Mao contrasted his own position against this, and we will see him do it again in this letter to Lin Biao that we are now reading.
The reason why this might have been redacted, is that by 1947 this phrasing (that is, “the Taiping-style of guerrilla warfare”) was long out of use in the Communist Party, and would have been confusing for many readers, given that the Communists preferred to emphasize the continuity of their revolution with the Taiping revolution in that it was a large-scale movement being carried out by impoverished peasant masses. It’s also worth mentioning that Li Lisan’s idea of what the Taiping guerrilla strategy was was more an ideological construction in his own mind and had little resemblance to the actual military operations of the Taiping.
Alright, back to the letter:
MRP3 235-236
That was a very long paragraph, and there is a lot in it. It’s kind of an extended preamble to everything that is going to follow.
First, let’s just clarify who some of these people were who Mao named alongside himself and Zhu De as pursuing the policy of establishing base areas and systematically setting up political power based on the close coordination of Communist armed forces with the peasant movement.
First was He Long, who had led in the formation of a soviet in the Hunan-Hubei border region. We’ve seen Mao refer to him admiringly a number of times as we discussed Mao’s own political development over the years of this podcast, particularly in his role as an early convert from social banditry to rural social revolutionary. He was from a poor rural family in Hunan, and got his start in peasant revolution when he killed a local government tax assessor who had killed his uncle for defaulting on his taxes. He fled to the hills, developed a reputation as a kind of Robin Hood figure, and developed his own small army, which he eventually brought into the National Revolutionary Army. And later he was one of the leaders of the Nanchang Uprising. And now, in 1930, he was leading a base area on the Hunan-Hubei border.
Li Wenlin was the main leader of the Communists in Donggu, in Jiangxi province, who we talked about a bit back in episode 109 when the Fourth Red Army found respite and recuperated in Donggu after retreating from the Jinggangshan.
Fang Zhimin was the main leader of another base area, this one in northeastern Jiangxi province. You will find this soviet sometimes referred to as the Xinjiang soviet, which can be confusing, because it refers to the Xin River in Northeastern Jiangxi, and not to the larger and better known Xinjiang autonomous region in China’s northwest.
Now, to be clear, these other figures who Mao names in the letter had not by any means articulated, as Mao had, a strategy for nationwide revolution based on using the expansion of Communist political power in the countryside as a way of hastening the development of an overall favorable national-level conjuncture which would make the nationwide seizure of power possible. But, by referring to He Long, Li Wenlin, and Fang Zhimin, Mao makes it clear that there was ample basis, beyond just the experience of the Fourth Red Army, for the argument that he is making in this letter.
Particularly salient in this document is Mao’s sense of the interpenetration of subjective and objective factors in the revolutionary process. How on the one hand, the revolutionary forces faced objective conditions, but also how they could affect those conditions, and help through their own actions to bring about a more favorable historical conjuncture where an attempt could be made to win the revolution. One way of phrasing this which was developed later on within global Maoism was the idea of ‘hastening while awaiting,’ the idea that not just in China as Mao was arguing in this document, but in any given context the revolutionary forces should be doing what they can in order to help bring about a revolutionary situation, and indeed, that perhaps a revolutionary situation might not even come about without the striving of the subjective forces of revolution, that is, the people who want to bring a revolution about, to help make it so. This is counterposed to a more deterministic and mechanical understanding of Marxism and crisis theory, which sees revolutionary situations as arising purely out of the unfolding of the objective workings of the capitalist system and the crises inherent to that system, basically independent of whatever initiative might be exercised by human will.
And you can see that more mechanical and deterministic understanding at play in the debates going on at the Party center in Shanghai at this time, about whether the revolutionary high tide which the Comintern had predicted was either on the way or had arrived already. Mao’s understanding of the issue was much more fluid and contingent, and hinged much more on the actions taken by the revolutionaries themselves.
And as we dig deeper into this letter next episode, we will see Mao get much more into the details of his understanding of how to make a revolution in the Chinese context of the 1930s.
Until then, be well.