Strategy of Protest and Revolution 5
Mao Zedong & The Chinese Communist Revolution, 1921-45
Part IV. Jiangxi, Long March, Shaanxi (1931-37)
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 IV, we’ll examine the rise and fall of the Jiangxi Soviet under Zhou Enlai, before briefly looking at the Long March and the Party’s eventual resettlement in northern Shaanxi.
10. 1931-34: Rural Revolution 3 – The Jiangxi Soviet
While Mao Zedong was violently reshaping the CCP at the local level, the Party was also being transformed by changes on the global stage. Frustrated with the CCP’s lack of progress and likely forewarned that the Japanese were about to invade China, by mid-1930 the Soviets had decided that the best way to protect themselves was to fully re-support Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT. Comintern strategy therefore made a complete U-turn: instead of pushing the CCP to attack KMT cities under the strategy of ‘rural insurrection’, the Soviets now endorsed the concept of ‘guerrillaism’, urging the Communists to re-focus on China’s rural hinterlands. In reality, the Party was being shoved out of Chiang’s way so that he could focus on Japan.
To the extent that the Soviets really cared about the CCP’s welfare, this gambit failed. After all, Chiang also understood the implications of the Comintern’s policy shift, which was that – for the moment at least – the Soviets could no longer oppose him, even if it meant standing aside as he crushed the Communists. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and so Chiang wrapped up his wars with the warlords and moved against the CCP, ignoring the calls from the KMT and his own military to prioritize Japan instead.
The CCP therefore faced tough times ahead, which meant that the Soviets could no longer tolerate its flailing leadership, which had spent so much of the Party’s energies to so little effect. They therefore overhauled the CCP’s top ranks yet again, exiling its leader in favor of a group of Soviet-trained cadres known as the ’28 Bolsheviks’ who were to align the Party with Stalin’s directives. For political reasons that will soon be made clear, CCP historiography has always marked this change as the start of the so-called ‘Rule of the 28 Bolsheviks’, but in reality, these newcomers were not placed in charge immediately. Instead, the Soviets appointed a temporary leader to guide the Party through this transition, and for that they chose one of the CCP’s most seasoned and trusted veterans – a man named Zhou Enlai.
True to his later reputation, Zhou was a master of organization, though he lacked independent vision and was therefore afflicted by the ‘bookishness’ and ideological control that had contributed to the Party’s poor strategymaking. But now that the Soviets had determined the CCP’s direction, Zhou could focus on his strengths, which was: to properly organize the Party’s rural bases and in doing so, recast guerrillaism from being a phenomenon of pure desperation and dependency, into an actual strategy that would build the Party power.
But first of all, Zhou would have to confront the biggest challenge currently facing CCP Central: Mao Zedong. Since Jinggangshan, Mao had repeatedly defied Party Central: ignoring its orders, criticizing its decisions, humiliating its leaders, and even usurping its power. The final straw came with his year-long purge of the Futian Terror, which had decimated the Party in its southern Jiangxi stronghold and replaced it with a semi-independent Party-State answerable only to Mao, ominously echoing the secession of Chiang Kai-Shek from the KMT. Zhou therefore sought to rein in this rebellious leader by any means necessary.
But before Zhou could act in earnest, however, Chiang struck first. In mid-1931, KMT agents swept through China’s cities in partnership with colonial police, capturing the CCP’s spy chief and even its General Secretary. In a single blow, CCP Central was shattered, forcing Zhou and the other surviving leaders to flee to the guerrilla bases, losing contact with each other and with the Comintern.
Finally reaching Jiangxi in early 1932, Zhou found Mao as defiant as ever. In response to Zhou’s initial attempts to reassert CCP control, Mao had unilaterally promoted his Party branch into a fully-fledged regional government known as the ‘Jiangxi Soviet’, with himself as Chairman as a way to claim equal status to the Party leader. But Zhou would not be deterred by Mao’s attempt at ‘organizational ambiguity’: instead, he gave Mao a taste of his own medicine, first by launching an ‘investigation’ of the Futian Terror that purged Mao’s loyalists from office, then by stripping the Chairmanship of all practical power. In this way, Mao was reduced to a mere figurehead and barely escaped being exiled to Moscow, while Zhou smoothly assumed full control over the Jiangxi Soviet.
Still, Zhou saw value in what Mao had done. Remember that under the traditional system, local elites had complete organizational control over rural society through their incentive framework, which meant that any central authority seeking access to rural resources had to first obtain elite consent. Inevitably, this meant that local elites would retain a large share of those resources, leaving little for the central government to use.
As noted in Chapter 2, local elite dominance was the core contributor to Chinese state weakness, yet reforming the system proved an impossible task, if only because wielding even the most basic political power already required elite consent. This tension was evident as late as Jinggangshan, where Mao, despite his zeal for social reform, nevertheless still compromised himself to local elites in order to remain politically relevant!
Things began to change with the Futian Terror. By wiping out so many guerrilla leaders, Mao had, as a side-effect, also decimated a good portion of southern Jiangxi’s elite, with the survivors too terrorized to refuse Party demands. Technically, the CCP now had quote-unquote ‘elite consent’ to fully access local resources, but Zhou remained unsatisfied. After all, the Party would still be relying on the elite-led system to govern, in particular the incentive framework that the landlords used to control the peasants: this had been good enough for all the previous conquerors of China, up to and including Chiang Kai-Shek; but to the CCP, such arrangements were not only antithetical to Communism, it also preserved the latent power of the local elites, and merely forced them to lay low until they could re-assert themselves against the central government in yet another turn of the feudal political cycle.
Instead, Zhou sought to dispense with this elite system entirely and replace it with a new form of governance that would be thoroughly and permanently controlled by the CCP. This was more than just expropriating the landlords, if only because some of the resources that made the local elite indispensable to governance were fundamentally non-transferrable. For instance, one such resource was overall knowledge of local land conditions, which only the local landlords possessed due to owning so much farmland. This wasn’t something that some incoming activist could easily or quickly learn, yet without it, the Party could not possibly control, let alone reform, society without stirring up a hornet’s nest of peasant disputes over land ownership, usage, quality and more!
Fortunately for Zhou, he could draw on a decade of Soviet rural work, as well as the CCP’s by-now-extensive experience with the peasants. Combining these ideas, Zhou quickly produced a political strategy to firmly root Communist governance throughout the Jiangxi Soviet, which this video will term the ‘Land Investigation Drive’ or LID.
Simply put, LID aimed to get local peasants to voluntarily construct and empower the local CCP Party-Government. This was a tall order, but the entire strategy was designed to whip up mass enthusiasm for such an effort, starting with the focus on the aforementioned ‘Land Investigation’ of local farmland. This was not only bound to arouse the interest of the peasants, but it was also one that could be applied everywhere the CCP controlled and moreover, satisfied Party members’ desire for social reform as well!
Excitement for the LID would be further reinforced at the various village meetings, where CCP cadres would gather the local peasantry before employing Leninist agitation to supercharge their fervor for land reform. Usually, this began as a highly-choreographed or even coerced affair, as the peasants, despite their obvious interest, had been incentivized by centuries of landlord dominance to stay quiet. Eventually, however, the inhibitions would fall away, and more and more peasants would denounce the old system as they quote-unquote ‘spoke bitterness’, creating an intense atmosphere that promoted rampant self-radicalization and strident demands for immediate redistribution.
With the peasants now primed for action, Party cadres now began to channel their energy towards building the Party-Government. Note that the peasants were not asked to come up with or even vote on the policy outcome, which was a role reserved for the Leninist Vanguard Party, aka the CCP. Instead, they were asked to help the Party-Government achieve land redistribution, either by volunteering their individual knowledge, or by joining groups like the ‘Poor Peasant Corps’ to help with practical implementation, such as surveying land, clearing wilderness, mediating disputes, and overcoming elite resistance. Exceptionally-useful individuals might even be invited into the Party to become cadres themselves!
Through such methods, which leveraged the collective power and knowledge of the peasants, the local CCP would swiftly replicate the knowledge, network and personnel advantages that were previously monopolized by local elites. This, combined with the material assets accumulated through confiscation and redistribution, meant that the Party had effectively and ironically rebuilt the traditional incentive framework that had controlled peasants for centuries, only this time, under complete Communist control. People no longer obeyed the CCP simply out of obligation to a landlord, nor because they necessarily felt a strong passion for the cause; rather, they did so now because the Party’s organizational power had now given them strong incentives for obedience, and even-stronger disincentives against disobedience.
In this way, the CCP was no longer a Leninist Mass Agitation movement, dependent on public enthusiasm – even if manipulated – to generate power. Instead, it was now more of an Ideologically-Mobilized movement, relying on its organizational incentive framework to compel people to work for it, regardless of enthusiasm. The Party had achieved this transition via a kind of political sleight-of-hand, loudly aligning itself with peasant desires even as it quietly set up a system that would let it override similar desires in the future. This was not to say that the LID was an exercise in pure cynicism – the local Party-Governments would use their powers to achieve land reform, after all – but the use of these institutional tools was never going to be limited to just what the peasants wanted. In fact, even as land redistribution was underway, the CCP Party-Governments were already deploying their capabilities for a far less popular cause, which was mass conscription into the Red Army.
Through LID, Zhou Enlai had also accomplished something of world-historical significance: the first modern, non-colonial Chinese government capable of ruling society without relying on the local elite. In other videos on this channel, I’ve referred to this phenomenon as ‘Europeanization’, after the centuries-long effort by the European central governments to similarly disempower their feudal nobility. With unfettered access to local resources, Europeanization was what transformed European states into the economic and military behemoths that they were throughout the long 19th Century: now, after a long, tortuous and bloody path, the CCP had also discovered Europeanization.
The results spoke for themselves: despite its short and turbulent existence, the Jiangxi Soviet government was able to appropriate 15-30% of individual incomes, compared to the KMT whose official tax rates – not counting local elite extractions – was around 5%. This in turn allowed the CCP to have a military that collectively made up about 3-5% of its population, as opposed to the KMT’s much larger army which nevertheless only totaled about 1% of its population. The Party also used some of these resources to kickstart various initiatives associated with societal modernization, such as: social policy, legal and macroeconomic reform, infrastructure development, and so on.
Through the Europeanization of the Jiangxi Soviet, the CCP had made tremendous strides towards solving the ‘Chinese Nationalist Question’ of becoming a modern society. But ultimately, this was not enough to save the Party-State, and two ‘original sins’ – originating well before Zhou’s leadership but nevertheless unresolved by him – would, within 3 years, sink the Party’s latest attempt at movement success.
The first was the pervasive anti-elite violence that persisted throughout the Party-State’s existence. While the CCP had always planned to dismantle the traditional elite order, the sheer bloodshed that Mao inflicted during the Futian Terror caused elites to flee southern Jiangxi in droves. And while Zhou reined in Mao’s excesses, lower-level violence was still very much a feature of his LID, with resentful peasants given full rein to bully the surviving landlords until they too abandoned their lands and left.
In revenge, some of the exiles sponsored anti-Communist activity within Jiangxi, but their efforts made little impact. Instead, the real damage came from the enormous drain of wealth as the elites took their money with them, which quickly plunged the Party-State into a vicious economic cycle of falling trade, collapsing production and rampant inflation. While the apocalyptic atmosphere that ensued initially further radicalized the peasants and encouraged dramatic reform, the Jiangxi Soviet shortly found itself strangled by severe resource shortages, with even the peasants beginning to run away.
The second ‘original sin’ was, of course, KMT suppression. Despite the Soviets and the CCP straining to avoid him, Chiang Kai-Shek remained steadfast in his belief that this was his best shot to get rid of Chinese Communism, and so continued to prioritize war with the Party, even at the cost of ceding territory to an expansionist Japan. In fact, by the time that Zhou took over in early 1932, the KMT had already launched 3 ‘Encirclement Campaigns’ against the Jiangxi Soviet, and was continuing to pour more and better troops into the theater.
Initially, CCP forces repelled the KMT’s onslaught, taking a page out of Mao’s Jinggangshan playbook and leveraging their control over the local population to lure in, entrap and defeat enemy units. It was also unclear whether Chiang could continue fighting his Civil War in the face of heavy public criticism, particularly after Japan attacked Manchuria and Shanghai: a few KMT formations would rebel and even defect to the Communists in protest!
Seeking to prolong the stalemate, the Jiangxi Soviet quote-unquote ‘declared war’ on Japan in mid-1932, even as it frantically expanded into KMT territory to try and keep Chiang’s armies as far away as possible. But Chiang pressed on, moving off to crush the CCP’s other regional bases before coming back for Jiangxi in 1933. A preemptive Red Army strike successfully ended the 4th Encirclement Campaign, but for the 5th one in August, Chiang sent nearly a million soldiers against the Party’s 150 thousand in a campaign of slow strangulation, where KMT troops would build ring after ring of fortifications as they advanced in order to deny Communist forces any room to maneuver.
This had now become a war of sheer numbers, one in which the CCP was powerless to prevail: while their administration was several times more efficient than the KMT regime, Chiang could call on tens of times more of everything. Desperate to squeeze every last resource out of the population, Zhou Enlai reverted to Mao-style purges and witch-hunts, resulting in a renewed Terror that swiftly demolished the Party-Governments that he had so recently built up. By the end of the Soviet, nearly 10% of the population were being persecuted as so-called ‘landlords’, with most of the rest in the process of deserting or defecting to the KMT. And so it was amidst this maelstrom of violence that the Jiangxi Soviet finally collapsed to KMT forces in late 1934, forcing the Party to flee into an uncertain future once more.
Official CCP historiography blames the fall of the Jiangxi Soviet on the ’28 Bolsheviks’ and their so-called ‘Leftist Deviation’, meaning that they focused too much on demolishing the traditional system instead of establishing a viable political order. As we’ve seen, this is a misdirection meant to downplay the leadership of Zhou Enlai, who would later be celebrated as Mao’s 2nd-in-command. In any case, Zhou arguably established about as viable an order as could be managed under the circumstances, brilliantly capitalizing on the peasant desire for reform to build a Europeanized, Ideologically-Mobilized Party-Government dependent on neither elite nor public for its power. This let the CCP act independently for the first time in its history, and would serve as the blueprint for how the Party intended to govern China.
The fact that the Jiangxi Soviet only lasted for about 4 years was due more to external circumstances than anything the CCP did: no matter how much it Europeanized, southern Jiangxi was never going to out-resource Chiang Kai-Shek. The pervasive anti-elite violence encouraged by Mao and Zhou hardly helped matters, but had they not resorted to that, the Party likely would have faded into irrelevance as a mere puppet for local elite interests. And so, despite being yet another catastrophic failure for the CCP, the Jiangxi experience appeared to indicate the path towards movement survival and success, albeit heavily obscured by two strategic problems that the Party would now have to find answers for: Firstly, how could they dismantle the traditional elite system without triggering societal collapse? And Secondly, how could they stop Chiang from using his superior numbers to crush them again?
11. 1934-1937: The Long March & The 2nd United Front
The CCP fled from Jiangxi in October 1934. Over the next year, the Party would take a winding route across the frontier wildernesses of western China, seeking to link up with other Communist remnants and establish a new guerrilla base. KMT forces followed them in pursuit, though by this time Chiang Kai-Shek was largely using the Communists as a pretext to place the frontier warlords under firmer regime control.
The military details of what would be celebrated as ‘The Long March’ are beyond the scope of this video, but we will note 2 events that shaped the CCP’s development during this period:
First was the Zunyi Conference, held in southwest China in January 1935. Here, Party leaders reflected on the loss of the Jiangxi Soviet as well as the disastrous start to the Long March, which had seen CCP strength drop from a hundred thousand troops to about 10 thousand. In the end, they came to a rather face-saving conclusion, which was to attribute their defeat not to political choices – such as the decision to pursue violent anti-elite redistribution – but instead, to military mistakes that could be excused by the fact that few of them had been real soldiers.
The personnel changes at Zunyi also reflected this spirit of compromise: Zhou Enlai, who as Jiangxi’s leader bore final responsibility for the CCP’s failure, was not removed; instead, he would now share military authority with a re-emergent Mao Zedong, whose sidelining during the Jiangxi Soviet meant that he could deny any responsibility for its fall. CCP histories have often depicted Mao’s re-emergence here as the Party finally uniting behind him, but as we will see in the following years, this was far from the case, and in any case, like with Zhou, Mao’s leadership was only meant to be temporary until the Soviet-trained ’28 Bolsheviks’ could finally take command.
The Second significant event was the struggle between Mao and the powerful regional Party boss Zhang Guotao in mid-1935, as the CCP traversed the highlands between western China and Tibet. At first, this was hardly an even fight: Zhang had a larger army, better revolutionary credentials, and even claimed to lead a government of his own! About the only advantage Mao had was his guardianship over CCP Central, which he fully leveraged to pull off yet another act of ‘Organizational Ambiguity’. Just like with Zhu De, Mao formally proposed to share control of the Red Army with Zhang, even as he used his own authority to veto anything Zhang proposed. After weeks of frustration, Zhang foolishly tried to set up a rival Party Central, which gave Mao the perfect pretext to denounce him, cut his faction loose, and eventually, leave him to be annihilated by KMT and warlord forces.
But even as this political fight raged on, the Soviets were preparing to yet again force a major shift in CCP strategy. Seeking to counterbalance a potential anti-Communist pact between Germany and Japan, in mid-1935 the Comintern announced the so-called ‘Popular Front’, instructing Communist parties to seek alliances with anybody opposing fascism, which in China meant Japan. The announcement came just as Mao’s CCP was re-establishing contact with the Comintern, and obediently, the Party publicly renounced any desire for further civil war or rural revolution, calling on all Chinese – including Chiang’s KMT – to unite with it in an anti-Japanese ‘2nd United Front’.
The CCP’s changed approach was evident when Mao’s forces settled in the northern inland province of Shaanxi, once again reduced to a ragtag group of barely 10 thousand men. Upon hearing that the local Party branch was still busy purging elites, Mao immediately ordered a halt to the violence, publicly affirming the political and economic rights of landlords and even offering compensation for their suffering. The re-established guerrilla base would no longer be a ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet’, but rather a ‘People’s Soviet’, operating under a regime of what would be known as ‘New Democracy’, where bourgeois and even wealthy nationalists would be just as valued as the proletarian class. At times, the CCP even distanced itself from Marxism-Leninism, claiming to actually follow Sun Yat-Sen’s liberal nationalism instead!
The CCP’s moderation largely worked: satisfied with its change of heart, neighboring warlords ceased hostilities and even began working with the Party to counter Chiang Kai-Shek! In particular, these included the KMT warlord-governors tasked with suppressing the Shaanxi base, who instead waged a ‘phony war’ against the Communists to allow it to rest and recover. But even then, the Party’s prospects remained bleak: northern Shaanxi had only a fraction of the resources of the already-poor Jiangxi base, translating into a Communist force that was barely 1% of the KMT Army; more devastatingly, the one person who remained unpersuaded by the CCP’s efforts was again, Chiang Kai-Shek himself, who in late 1936 arrived in Shaanxi to personally oversee the final destruction of the Party. Already, Mao was looking to relocate further into the frontier wilderness, perhaps even cross the border into Soviet Outer Mongolia…
Then suddenly, the tide turned. In the famous ‘Xi’an Incident’, Chiang Kai-Shek was kidnapped by his warlord-governors, who demanded an end to the Civil War and the formation of a national anti-Japanese front. Anxious to prevent China from imploding, Stalin stepped in to broker a deal for a renewed ‘2nd United Front’: the scale of his diplomatic intervention both surprised and angered Mao, who undoubtedly feared similar Soviet interference in internal Party affairs. Nevertheless, the CCP had been saved from immediate annihilation, with Chiang ending the Civil War and resigning himself to the upcoming war with Japan.
The terms of the 2nd United Front essentially locked the KMT and the CCP into the political status quo: the KMT would re-admit both the CCP’s Shaanxi base and the Red Army into its regime, though in practice the Communists would enjoy de facto independence; in exchange, the CCP would cease all hostilities against the KMT, and also refrain from engaging in class struggle. Though superficially modest, this agreement effectively solved one of the CCP’s key strategic dilemmas, which was: how to prevent Chiang Kai-Shek from using his superior resources to steamroll the CCP. Now diplomatically shielded from the KMT’s wrath, the Communists could finally begin the process of rebuilding, even as it waited for a ‘Window of Opportunity’ to open.
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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 IV of a 6-Part series; Part V will cover the CCP’s big break: the 2nd Sino-Japanese War.
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