Strategy of Protest and Revolution 5
Mao Zedong & The Chinese Communist Revolution (1921-45)
Part III: Insurrection & Guerrillaism, Jinggangshan & Futian (1927-31)
Hi, and welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is the 5th entry in ‘The Strategy of Protest and Revolution’, where we examine how historical revolutionary and protest movements achieved success. In this series, we focus on 3 key questions:
- How did activists turn public discontent into a coordinated movement?
- What did successful movements do to achieve their goals? And
- How have successful movement strategies changed over time?
In this 6-part entry, we’ll explore the revolutionary history of the Chinese Communist Party or CCP from 1921 to 45, with a particular focus on the experiences of its eventual leader, Mao Zedong. Here in Part III, we’ll go over the various approaches the CCP took to obtain its own independent military power, focusing particularly on Mao’s experiences at Jinggangshan and southern Jiangxi.
8. 1927-28: Rural Revolution 1 – Insurrection & Guerrilla-ism
The massacres of 1927 had left the newly re-independent CCP in rough shape, to put it mildly. Not only had most of its members and organizations been wiped out, but the KMT had now switched from being its protector to its hunter. This also meant that local establishment elites could once again target local Party branches without interference from the KMT Party-Army, resulting in a nationwide web of suppression that thwarted most Communist attempts to rebuild.
Still, there were a few silver linings. Firstly, despite reuniting the KMT by late-1927, Chiang Kai-Shek would soon encounter stiff resistance from the warlords of Northern China. From 1927 to 31, Central China became a chaotic battlefield as the warring parties fought, negotiated, allied and betrayed each other in rapid succession, and on top of that, Chiang’s naked favoritism soon began to split the KMT apart once more, with regional leaders leading various rebellions and Party-States against him. The beaten-down CCP was therefore the least of Chiang’s worries during this period.
Secondly, by late-1927, Stalin had also successfully ousted Trotsky from Soviet leadership, which finally gave him the political space to set a more realistic policy on China. Accordingly, the Comintern released the CCP from the now-defunct UF, declaring that the Party was the only ‘revolutionary organization’ left in the country. This gave the green light for the Party to finally begin military resistance against the KMT, though not before Stalin scapegoated and replaced its founding leader in order to mask his own failure.
The CCP was now free to follow Lenin’s strategy for the Russian Revolution: namely, to form or assume leadership over worker organizations, agitate them to seize major cities, and then spread the revolution out to the rest of the country. This focus on the cities – which both Lenin and the UF shared – was based on the Marxist assumption that the urban proletariat would be the most receptive to the Communist Issue, and it also made strategic sense, given that China’s metropolises housed most of the country’s human and technical resources. The newly-installed CCP leadership therefore decided to pursue a highly-aggressive, urban-focused strategy, aiming to break the KMT’s grip over the cities through mass insurrection.
But in selecting this approach, the new Party leadership demonstrated that its strategic sense was little better than its predecessor’s. This was especially the case at the operational level, which centered around militia- or soldier-led uprisings that sought to mimic Lenin’s successful coup in 1917 Russia. Once again, the Party seemingly forgot that the KMT had also learnt from that experience, and had developed various political and military defenses against it.
As a result, Communist success in urban insurrection was sporadic and fleeting: typical examples would be the Nanchang Uprising – commemorated as the founding of the Chinese Red Army – and the Guangzhou Uprising, both of which held their cities for a few days before the KMT Army came in, crushed the revolt, and exterminated the local Party branches in the ensuing witch-hunt. Before long, the urban CCP branches had become so degraded by these efforts that they could do little else but resort to random assassination and terrorism, which did little to alter the political balance.
Urban insurrection was therefore a dead-end, but CCP growth during the Northern Expedition meant that the Party was no longer a purely urban movement. That opened up the alternative of rural insurrection, where the Party would use its peasant organizations to mobilize vast armies that would then storm the cities alongside the factory workers.
On paper, rural insurrection leveraged the CCP’s previous success with the peasants, which the Party estimated would result in forces collectively numbering in the millions. In reality, when the time finally came to rise up, the results were generally quite farcical, with most Party branches only mobilizing a few hundred people at best! Granted, a few efforts enjoyed greater success – such as the ‘Autumn Harvest Uprising’ launched by Mao Zedong, or the Hailufeng Soviet which is commemorated as the CCP’s first territory – but even these only lasted a few weeks before falling to KMT military attack.
Such drastic underperformance might seem strange, considering the CCP’s initial confidence and the KMT’s inability to fully pacify China’s anarchic countryside. But this can again be traced back to the organizational realities of Chinese rural politics, which thwarted Sun Yat-Sen’s attempt to mobilize the peasants and now similarly dismayed CCP activists. Fundamentally, local establishment elites controlled all the institutions and resources within local society, resulting in an incentive framework that forced all but the most reckless of peasants to follow their political lead. While the United Front was still in place, the even more powerful incentive framework imposed by the KMT Army had forced these elites to tolerate or even endorse CCP recruitment; but as soon as Chiang switched sides, almost every landlord promptly renounced their previous alignment and successfully pressured the peasants under them to do the same.
But not all landlords. As usual, there were a few who broke with their own class for altruistic or political reasons, and they were especially common within the wildernesses of the inner Chinese frontiers, where modern ideological conflicts blended with generational blood feuds over resources, ethnicity and prestige. Traditionally beyond the reach of central authorities, these areas became ideal havens for the desperate CCP, with Party activists offering their specialized skills to local frontier elites in exchange for military protection.
This phenomenon – later strategy – would be known as ‘guerrilla-ism’, and it was what primarily kept the Party alive in its darkest, post-massacre hours. In a sense, guerrillaism was simply the traditional elite incentive framework flipped in favor of the CCP: just like in the KMT areas, where people had no choice but to follow Chiang Kai-Shek’s agenda, peasants in what would be called the ‘Red Revolutionary Base Areas’ were compelled by local elites to participate in Communism, whether it be joining the CCP, contributing to its work, or defending it as members of the ‘Red Guards’. And while the KMT Army could have conquered any one of these bases, their distance, poverty, and Chiang’s warlord focus made them a low priority. In this way, the rural CCP was allowed to regrow in peace: and in time, some bases would even federate to collectively take over large swathes of countryside, leaving the KMT with little else outside of the cities!
By far the most famous example of guerrillaism was Mao Zedong’s 15-month stay in the mountains of Jinggangshan, on the frontier between the southern inland provinces of Jiangxi and Hunan. Initially, following the CCP strategy of rural insurrection, Mao had mobilized an army of peasants in the ‘Autumn Harvest Uprising’ and marched them to Hunan’s capital, only to be quickly repelled by the local KMT garrison. Realizing that further action here would only be suicidal, Mao’s force retreated into the wilderness, eventually reaching the mountain stronghold of Jinggangshan where they were welcomed by the local elites – also known as ‘bandits’ to their enemies.
Offering his limited strength to support his hosts, Mao repeatedly sent his force down the mountains to raid rival elites living below: eventually, his victims appealed to the provincial KMT governors, who dispatched various units to try and suppress the stronghold. But these second-tier units were no match for Mao and his elite allies, who skillfully exploited their organizational control over the local population to repeatedly mislead, lure in, trap and rout the KMT soldiers. And with their victories, Jinggangshan cemented its status as a leading guerrilla base for Communism.
But was it really? Back in Chapter 4, I mentioned that local elite allies nevertheless still posed an ideological challenge to the CCP, because their general lack of interest in Communism, coupled up with their vested interest in the traditional system, would constantly nudge the Party – in deed if not in word – towards the societal status quo and away from meaningful change. Guerrillaism greatly accelerated this tendency, as the desperately-weak Party simply could not overpower the deeply-entrenched elites and their incentive frameworks, which left the latter free to dilute the base’s Communism until it was little more than a slogan. Even Mao himself could not avoid this dynamic, as he scaled back land and peasant reforms at the behest of his Jinggangshan allies…
…but then, a series of unexpected events would suddenly upset this stable if stagnant state of affairs, violently tossing the CCP into a new cycle of destructive change and organizational progress.
9. 1928-31: Rural Revolution 2 – Ideological Struggles
By mid-1928, the CCP had stabilized from the massacres of 1927, and in some provinces even controlled vast areas of countryside with hundreds of thousands of peasants. Ideologically, however, the Party had become dangerously fractured: on the one hand, despite much of the Party’s strength now coming from guerrilla elites pursuing local dominance under guerrillaism, their nominal leaders in Party Central continued to push for attacks on distant cities under their strategy of ‘rural insurrection’. On the other hand, many guerrilla elites had also vastly diluted their Communism, reverting to traditional forms of governance even as Party Central insisted that they do otherwise.
These splits were indicative of a Party base that had failed to escape the ideological control of either Soviet Communism or Chinese nationalism, leading to policies that were ideologically ‘legitimate’ but in reality caused the CCP to veer off its mission and become enslaved to outside interests. The result was a choice between two equally-self-defeating outcomes: either bloody self-sacrifice for Soviet benefit, or unreformed stasis that offered little over the landlord establishment of the KMT.
The CCP could have continued drifting down this path, fading into irrelevance as its dogmatic strategies failed to generate the power needed to win. That it did not do so was primarily due to 2 factors: First, the nonconformist mind of the activist-turned-warlord Mao Zedong; and Second, what Mao was about to experience. As of mid-1928, he was still cooped up in Jinggangshan, having found the ‘guns’ that he had quipped were necessary for the Party to exercise independent political power. In the process, however, Mao had ironically lost much of his independence anyway, as he shelved much of his Communist agenda in order to appease his local elite allies.
But then came somebody who would both usher in a problem that would dog Mao for the rest of his life, yet also set him on the path towards Party and national leadership. This person was… actually just an emissary from CCP Central in Shanghai, sent in response to news that Mao had raised a peasant army. Dutifully following the Party strategy of ‘rural insurrection’, the emissary asked Mao and his allies to storm a nearby city – even though a significant KMT garrison was already guarding the place.
Sensibly, Mao rejected this suicidal order, but the emissary was undeterred. Instead, he now tried to seize control of Jinggangshan, criticizing Mao for not implementing Communism in this ostensibly-‘Red’ guerrilla base. In particular, he pointed out – correctly if simplistically – that Mao’s power was rooted in his alliance with the local elites rather than the peasants, the results of which preserved the traditional rural system the CCP had sworn to overthrow.
Belatedly, Mao tried to address the emissary’s concerns by launching a crash program of peasant recruitment, land redistribution, and ideological education. But far from bolstering his position, these actions instead had the opposite effect: as people absorbed the Communist dogma, they quickly realized that it was Party Central’s emissary, not Mao, who actually had the more ‘legitimate’ voice within the CCP, and shifted allegiances accordingly. Soon enough, the emissary felt politically strong enough to demand Mao attack the nearby city again, and when Mao refused, he simply launched the assault himself, with half of the Jinggangshan force following him.
The result was a complete disaster for both sides. The CCP emissary’s campaign was predictably unsuccessful, with his forces briefly occupying the city before getting annihilated by the KMT garrison. And with half of its army gone, Jinggangshan opened itself up to attack, with hostile elites quickly reclaiming large sections of the base and forcing the peasants within to work against Communism once more. Dismayed by these losses of men and materiel, CCP morale collapsed, and it was soon clear that the Party’s time here was at an end. In early 1929, faced with famine and an impending KMT assault, Mao finally evacuated his guerrilla base.
The loss of Jinggangshan deeply embittered Mao, fueling his lifelong grudge against CCP Central, CCP bureaucracy, and anybody associated with them. Realizing now that Party Central’s inflexible adherence to Communist dogma was the true cause of their numerous strategic missteps, Mao began to belittle their thinking as so-called ‘bookishness’, criticizing their dogmatic tendency to value what was ideologically legitimate over what was practically useful.
But as previously analyzed, bookishness was not merely political naivete: it was a rational choice given the importance of ideological correctness within CCP legitimacy, without which no Party leader could survive for long. By publicly going against Party dogma, Mao invited challenges to his own leadership, and he would soon find that there were no shortage of rivals willing to take him up on the offer.
That said, Mao was no stranger to politicking. Having famously made the link between power and guns, Mao understood very well how his power was constantly threatened from those with more guns, especially considering that his peasant militia was not a particularly impressive force.
Initially, Mao used two methods to secure his leadership against militarily-superior rivals. The first was to leverage his knowledge of Communist ideology and organization, which he marketed not only as a path to enlightenment, but also as a practical tool that could strengthen his allies. For instance, becoming Communist not only connected the Jinggangshan elite with other Red forces, it also gave them license to expropriate enemies ‘in the name of the people’! However, for Mao to recognize them as ‘true Communists’, these elites would have to listen to what he said at least some of the time.
In cases where the challenger was already a recognized Communist, Mao resorted to his second method, which this video will call ‘Organizational Ambiguity’. In it, Mao would ostensibly concede formal leadership to his rival, even while he retained real control through less-visible but critical offices. An example of this occurred at Jinggangshan, when a large force of defecting KMT soldiers under Zhu De arrived at the base. With his superior strength, Zhu wanted to and could have taken over everything, but Mao deflected his demands by splitting up the Jinggangshan CCP into ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ branches, with Mao heading the former and Zhu the latter. On paper, Zhu now led the base’s military forces, but in reality, Mao ensured that key support functions such as strategymaking and logistics were kept under civilian control. As a result, Zhu found himself unable to do much without civilian approval, which reduced him back to being a mere subordinate of Mao’s.
But all that was back at Jinggangshan. Now that the base had been lost and the guerrillas were back to being a roaming army, there was no more civilian branch for Mao to derive authority from. Zhu seized on this opportunity to strike: revealing that Party Central had instructed him to reassert authority, Zhu asked his soldiers to demand Mao relinquish power, which they did after a vote. Accordingly, Mao resigned…
…but only for a while. For while Zhu De was making his bid for power, Mao had already developed a third method for political survival, which was: to appeal to none other than the Comintern itself! Despite his problems with Soviet ideological control, Mao was nevertheless cynical enough to enlist their help whenever he needed it. He was also greatly helped by Zhu’s lack of political acumen, since the soldier-elections that Zhu organized, while part of Leninist Communism during the Russian Revolution, had by 1929 become linked with Trotskyism – Stalin’s ideological archenemy. Knowing this, Mao complained to the Comintern about his ouster, prompting the Soviets to angrily berate CCP Central until they disavowed Zhu’s actions and reinstated Mao to power.
This directly led to Mao’s fourth and most effective method of them all: the appropriately-Soviet notion of kompromat. Zhu’s coup had ended in complete failure: not only was Mao back in power with Soviet blessing, but Zhu was left guilty of Trotskyism and usurping Party leadership – offenses that could have ejected him from the CCP or worse. Instead, Mao kept Zhu on as an ally, not just out of respect for his military talents, but more importantly, because Zhu was now politically compromised and therefore at Mao’s complete mercy. From here on out until his death in the 1970s, Zhu De would be a steadfast supporter of Mao’s, giving the latter a critical foothold within the Communist military.
Mao had politically survived, but he still needed a new base to settle his force into. By early 1930, his wanderings had taken him to southern Jiangxi province, where pro-CCP elites had federated to create the Party’s largest guerrilla base in China, completely isolating the few cities that the KMT still held there. At first, Mao admired the scale of their achievement, famously quipping that: ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’, but he soon realized the price paid for such success. For in order to find common ground, the elites – like at Jinggangshan – had diluted their Communism to such an extent that their rule was barely distinguishable from the traditional system that the CCP was meant to dismantle, with local landlords lording it over the peasants just like in Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT.
This was both a concern and an opportunity for Mao. Seeing their ideological neglect as an opening to take control, Mao declared himself the base’s overall leader, with powers to command the region’s elites. And to make sure that he would not be challenged ideologically as he was at Jinggangshan, Mao kicked things off with a land redistribution program, albeit with specifics slightly different from those set by CCP Central. In all likelihood, Mao designed this to be a loyalty test, meant to identify who would follow him over Party Central.
Mao’s power grab threw southern Jiangxi into chaos. He had assumed control without Party approval, and his land redistribution threatened to wreck the cohesion and even survival of the local guerrilla elites. And on top of that, it was a major blow to the CCP’s ideological standing, since Mao was sure to ignore Party Central’s demands to seize cities, during a time when the Comintern was already pressuring it to show results as part of the global ‘revolutionary upsurge’ in the wake of the Great Depression. And so, in a last-ditch effort to resist him, CCP Central urged the local Jiangxi guerrilla elites to form their own counter-leadership against Mao.
Faced with the growing resistance against him, Mao resorted to a shocking yet decisive solution. Feigning obedience to Party Central, Mao seized a relatively-unimportant city from the KMT, only to conveniently ‘discover’ a spy list that listed many of the guerrilla elites as KMT agents. Using this to declare that the Jiangxi CCP had been thoroughly infiltrated by ‘Anti-Bolsheviks’ and ‘Trotskyites’, Mao directed his loyalists to begin a purge of so-called ‘Party enemies’, rounding up thousands of activists – both elite and ordinary – to be detained, tortured, humiliated and executed.
Caught off-guard by the sudden brutality, the guerrilla elites fought back with their own purges, killing thousands of Mao’s followers in the process, but this merely gave Mao more reason to extend the duration and scope of his terror. Neither was CCP Central able to stop him: by framing his actions as an ‘ideological cleansing’, Mao successfully tapped into Stalin’s infamous paranoia, and nobody in the Party nor the Comintern dared intervene for fear of being purged themselves.
In the end, what this video will call the ‘Futian Terror’ – so-called after the still-highly-taboo rebellion of a Red Army unit during the purges – lasted for a year and once again left the CCP in utter shambles. At least a quarter of the southern Jiangxi CCP had been eliminated, most of these being local guerrilla elites whose heirs immediately defected to Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT. But the killings had not been entirely valueless from an organizational standpoint. Through sheer violence, Mao demonstrated that he would inflict intolerable punishment on anyone who defied him, and so everybody had better follow his orders, whether they saw them as ‘legitimate’ or not. In the words of our social movement template, Mao had now imposed an incentive framework upon CCP participants that compelled them to work towards his Issue, irrespective of what they truly believed. Slowly, painfully, the CCP was transforming into an Ideologically-Mobilized movement.
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Thanks for watching the video, and please like, subscribe and hit the bell button! If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section. This is Part III of a 6-Part series; Part IV will cover the rise and fall of the Jiangxi Soviet, where the CCP would truly govern independently for the first time, as well as its subsequent Long March to northwestern China.
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