When the enemy advances, Mao and Zhu retreat from Fujian into Jiangxi province, drawing the Guomindang’s joint suppression force deep in after them, only to later circle back around and defeat it. In this episode we discuss how Mao conducted propaganda directed at enemy troops in order to win them over to join the Red Army.
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
Bixin Huang, “A Movement Without Vitality: Communist Revolution in Fujian, 1924-1934”
Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893-1937 (毛泽东年谱)
Agnes Smedley, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh [Zhu De]
Some names from this episode:
Lin Biao, commander of the first column of the Fourth Red Army
Jin Handing, commander of the joint-suppression force launched against the western Fujian base area
Lo Pinghui, Yunnanese colonel who switched from the Guomindang to the Communists
Episode artwork: photo of Jin Handing
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 136 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
Where we last left Mao Zedong, he had just sent off his January 5, 1930 letter to Lin Biao.
Now, Mao was at a point where a decision had to be made. He had consolidated his leading position for the time being at the Gutian Conference, and clarified his political line in his letter to Lin Biao. Now was time to act. And the situation was somewhat urgent. On the one hand, Mao had a positive plan for moving forward to take and consolidate more territory in Jiangxi province. But on the other hand, Mao was in a position where he had to react quickly to a major military threat that the enemy was posing to the base area in western Fujian.
The Guomindang provincial level governments of Guangdong, Hunan, and Jiangxi had collaborated to put together a force of 14 regiments and used them to launch a joint-suppression campaign meant to wipe out the Communist base area in western Fujian. Leading this force was an old comrade of Zhu De’s from Yunnan named Jin Handing. Now, these regiments would ideally have been around 1,000 troops each, although it was common for Guomindang regiments at the time to be smaller than 1,000 troops in strength (although they could also sometimes be larger). So if you’re trying to envision the size of this combined force that was set against the Communists, think in the ballpark of 14,000 troops.
The approach that Mao and Zhu De decided on to tackle this Guomindang suppression force was going to be an immediate test of their thinking on military tactics. Remember, the points that Mao repeatedly emphasized, and that we talked about most recently in our discussion of Mao’s letter to Lin Biao. There was the idea that:
“The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.”
And along with this principle of military tactics, Mao mentioned something else very relevant here in that letter to Lin Biao, which was the idea that:
“when pursued by a powerful enemy, circle around.”
You may recall that it was during the retreat from the Jinggangshan when Mao explored this idea of circling around in practice and elevated his experience to the level of a principle of military theory, as we discussed back in episode 110.
So now, Mao and Zhu decided to put their theory into practice. To do this, they formulated a policy that they called ‘Leave western Fujian to consolidate western Fujian.’ There were a couple different levels to this idea. On one level, the plan was completely in line with Mao’s ideas about ceding ground to the enemy in order to tire them out, harass them, demoralize them, and then come back around and defeat them. On another level, Mao also hoped that western Fujian would be safe because the main aim of the suppression campaign was to annihilate the 4th Red Army, and so if the Army retreated, then Jin Handing would follow them rather than hanging around and having a big massacre of the Communists’ supporters who had been left behind.
The Special Committee of the Communist Party, as the base area’s governing body, wasn’t so sure and sent a message to Mao requesting that a column of troops be left behind to defend the base area. But Mao told the messenger that ‘The enemy forces are following our steps. They will not stay in western Fujian and follow your steps.’ So all that was left behind in western Fujian were the local militia forces, which were known as Red Guards. But these didn’t really compare with the regular Red Army troops at all, and were locally known as a ‘bean curd unit’ because it was likely to crumble like bean curd.
This problem of preserving the Red Army and finding the right conditions in which it could defeat numerically superior reactionary armed forces could clearly be very difficult on local and relatively immobile civilian supporters of the Communist movement when the Red Army was compelled to cede terrain to the enemy. And this was a recurring theme in our discussion of the Jinggangshan base area.
But luckily for the people in western Fujian, Mao was right. On January 7 Mao and Zhu began separately leading different parts of the Red Army out of western Fujian and into Jiangxi province, with Mao leading one column and Zhu leading the main force. Counting on superior mobility and a certain degree of local support, Mao and Zhu lured the suppression force away from western Fujian, tiring it out, and then, during the last week of January, circled around and, taking advantage of the element of surprise, defeated the counter-revolutionary campaign.
During this time, Mao had the opportunity to draft a fairly extensive propaganda appeal in an attempt to convince Guomindang soldiers that they were fighting for the wrong side and to come over and join the Red Army. This appeal isn’t just some hastily written short flyer. It’s nine pages long in the version translated in the Mao’s Road to Power document collection, and it develops a series of arguments meant to educate and win over the Guomindang troops. While I think that one might expect a document like this to focus on bread-and-butter issues, such as the poor way in which rank-and-file Guomindang soldiers were treated, the appeal instead prioritizes political arguments first, and only then comes back around to more ‘economic’ or ‘daily life’ related arguments. Of particular note to me was the important role that the Soviet Union and its defense played in how Mao crafted the appeal. For these reasons, I think will be interesting to take a closer look at this document, to understand how Mao tried to win over rank-and-file Guomindang soldiers. And, as you might recall, because there was a constant influx of defeated Guomindang soldiers who were recruited into the Red Army, I think that this document also probably gives us some insight into the way that political education was carried out with those soldiers in the early stages of their assimilation into the ranks of the Red Army.
The title of this document, at least as given in the Mao’s Road to Power compilation, is “Letter from the Fourth Army of the Chinese Red Army (the Red Army of Zhu and Mao) to the Soldiers of the Guomindang Army:”
And here’s how Mao introduces the letter:
MRP3 247-8
What I find most interesting in these first two paragraphs is that this is essentially a political appeal to the Guomindang soldiers, rather than an appeal pitched at addressing the immediate living and working (or fighting) conditions of the enemy soldiers. That is, this appeal treats the Guomindang soldiers as thinking people who might be fighting for a moral cause, and addresses the concerns that Guomindang soldiers who patriotically might have joined the National Revolutionary Army back in 1926 or 1927 about how all the promises of that revolution had been betrayed by Chiang Kaishek and the other Guomindang leaders.
Rather than basing the initial appeal on the various issues that we know made life very difficult for rank-and-file Guomindang soldiers at the time, such as corporal punishment, bad food, failure to receive pay, and the extreme inequality and lack of democracy within the army, Mao initiates this appeal by discussing how the Guomindang had betrayed the revolution, and was now preparing the throw more soldiers’ lives away in the service of the imperialist powers’ war against the Soviet Union, and in in-fighting with other warlords. Meanwhile, Mao emphasizes how the Red Army still upholds the ideals of the revolutionary movement.
Mao continues with this approach that raises the sights of the reader to loftier, world-historic goals beyond the (totally legitimate) grievances that one might expect him to emphasize, by moving on to discuss why the Red Army supported the Soviet Union (which had just finished the war with the Guomindang that we discussed in episodes 126 to 129). It wasn’t exactly clear in January 1930 that the war in Manchuria might not soon break out again, and, as we have previously discussed, the position of the Chinese Communists was essentially that of seeing the Soviets as opening another front in the people’s war that they were already fighting. Here’s how Mao explained the Red Army’s support for the Soviet Union to the Guomindang soldier audience of this piece:
MRP3 248-249
Mao continues in the next paragraph to continue making a political appeal to the Guomindang soldiers on the front of domestic politics, by discussing the Guomindang’s betrayal of Sun Yatsen’s principles. And then it is only after this, in the fifth long paragraph, which is subtitled “What are the sufferings of us soldiers?” that Mao changes the nature of his appeal to revolve around the more immediate conditions of life of the Guomindang soldier.
Now, you might be wondering, why am I differentiating between these higher-minded political appeals that Mao begins with and the appeals that he follows up with that are more focused around the lived conditions of the soldiers?
The question of the differing weights given to these different types of appeals is actually a very important issue in the Communist tradition, and so dissecting the way in which a leading figure like Mao crafts his appeals can actually reveal a lot not only about what he thought was the more correct way to go about conducting political propaganda in pursuit of his immediate goals (in this case winning Guomindang troops to come over to join the Red Army, or to indoctrinate captured Guomindang troops who were being convinced to join the Red Army). But it also helps to situate Mao’s position within the Communist intellectual tradition on this question. To understand why I think that this matters for understanding Mao, we have to go back to Lenin for a minute.
One of Lenin’s big contributions to Communist thinking about how to actually have a successful revolution revolved around this question. Lenin argued that the workers’ struggles for improved living and working conditions were not inherently subversive of capitalism. The role of the socialists, in Lenin’s view, was to intervene in the struggles of the working class in order to draw connections between the workers’ economic struggle and the various other forms of oppression. By raising the level of consciousness of the workers from just understanding their own problems to having a more all-sided understanding of the ways in which the Russian empire oppressed women, peasants, students, national minorities, and others, Lenin argued that the socialists could divert the workers’ spontaneous movement for reforms into a more consciously socialist movement which would be prepared to take advantage of a fortunate conjuncture of events and seize power in the future.
Because Lenin thought that this raising of workers’ consciousness to a higher level beyond just understanding how they were oppressed and fighting for the demands of their own class (by forming unions, for example), Lenin and the Communists who agreed with him often crafted propaganda that was meant to raise the sights of workers beyond just fighting back around their own issues, by drawing them to understand the overall political picture. Lenin ran into a lot of resistance from people who said that really the thing to do was just to focus on workers’ immediate interests, because after all it was hard enough to get people involved politically and for many of the workers who the Communists were trying to work with, a lot of these other issues seemed either irrelevant or like something that should be put off because the immediate struggle was already so urgent.
Now, Lenin said that that even if these people were sometimes right about narrower appeals being more effective at mobilizing larger numbers of people in some contexts, that taking this approach would set you up ultimately to never actually be able to have a revolution, because workers would stay at the level of trade union consciousness and you couldn’t develop a more all-encompassing Communist movement and revolution without having a broader perspective.
Within the Communist movement, Lenin’s approach was incredibly controversial before the Russian Revolution, and afterwards it continued to be controversial in a somewhat disguised form. Of course, after the victory of the Russian Revolution, it was standard practice for Lenin’s ideas to be canonized and lauded by everyone. But a recurring theme over the years on this podcast has been the way in which the old, non-revolutionary ideas of the Second International kept on resurfacing within the Communist movement. We’ve usually talked about this in regard to the theory of the productive forces, like in episodes 43 and 103, which mechanically tied the possibility for revolution to the level of capitalist industrialization within a particular country. And which downplayed the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. But this malingering approach to revolutionary propaganda frequently popped up in the form of pragmatic or deliberately narrow appeals made under the pressure of urgent circumstances, which tended to ignore raising the sights of the masses beyond addressing their own immediate concerns revolving around their conditions of life (the term that Lenin used for these sorts of appeals was ‘economist,’ as in, an appeal to workers focused solely on raising their wages would be an ‘economist’ appeal).
Now, how is this relevant to Mao? Well, can we think of any more urgent situation than that of a warzone? Would there be any more justifiable place to make an appeal which might be more effective because it had been made more narrow, because it had been made to have a lower common denominator for uniting with the intended audience of the propaganda? I would think that the pressure to leave off from talking about high ideals and just try one’s best to undermine the enemy soldier’s willingness to fight would be at its maximum under these conditions. I think that there had to be someone close to Mao who said, “there’s no way these soldiers are going to read to page four to get to the stuff about how we treat soldiers better and don’t have corporal punishment in the Red Army.” There had to be.
And so, the effort that Mao makes here to be a good Leninist, to prioritize making high-minded and political appeals even in such an urgent context, tells us a lot about Mao even at this early date in 1930. There is a throughline here between Mao the Leninist of 1930 and the later Mao of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s who tried to move the economy as much as possible into the realm of moral over material incentives. And it’s kind of cool how you can see it come out in a small piece of propaganda like this.
Now, just to wrap up our discussion of this piece of propaganda, let’s see how Mao did appeal to the Guomindang soldiers on issues more directly related to their own lived experience in the very long fifth paragraph of the piece:
MRP3 250-252
OK, now, we’ve read most of this piece, lets move on to consider a very important question when it comes to any piece of propaganda, how was it received and how effective was it? Sadly, this is a question that we can’t answer with much certainty.
The propaganda piece operated in conjunction with several other factors to win enemy troops over to the side of the Red Army.
One major factor was the continuing allegiance that many of the troops in the Yunnanese army at the core of the joint suppression campaign had to Zhu De.
In the interview that Zhu De gave to Agnes Smedley for her biography of him, The Great Road, Zhu tells how Guomindang troops who knew him from Yunnan actively sabotaged the orders of their officers and regularly used peasant messengers to send him reports. And that sometimes large numbers of these troops would pay a peasant to guide them to the nearest Red Army unit so they could desert and join the Red Army.
One Guomindang colonel from Yunnan, Lo Pinghui, had secretly joined the Communist Party in July 1929 and then towards the beginning of the joint suppression campaign (either in December 1929 or January 1930, depending which source you consult) brought his whole regiment over to join the Red Army.
And the standard method that the Communists used for winning Guomindang troops over to joining the Red Army was by defeating them in battle, and then, afterwards, conducting a political education session with them and then giving them to option of either going home or joining the Red Army.
So this propaganda pamphlet that Mao wrote complimented these other means of winning over enemy soldiers in how it served as a way of articulating the differences between the Red Army and the Guomindang for these Guomindang soldiers, and was a kind of starting point for winning them to the Communist cause and for what might be their ongoing political education.
Alright, that’s it for now, until next time, be well.