From Jinggangshan to Yan’an: the soviet bases and the Long March

The revolution goes to the mountains

Defeated in the Autumn Harvest rising of 1927, Mao led his thousand survivors into Jinggangshan on the Hunan–Jiangxi border. Allying with the bandit chiefs Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo, he built a base that confiscated landlord land, and in April 1928 Zhu De’s remnants from Nanchang joined to form the Fourth Red Army. The sixteen-character guerrilla formula — “the enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy halts, we harass; the enemy tires, we strike; the enemy retreats, we pursue” — was born here. Source 1 · Source 2

In “Why is it that Red political power can exist in China?” (1928) Mao explained that splits among the warlords and rivalry among the powers made separate rural regimes possible — a different road from the party centre waiting for workers’ uprisings. The Gutian Conference of 1929 established party organisation within the army on the principle that “the party commands the gun”, and by 1930 bases covered dozens of counties in southern Jiangxi and western Fujian. Source 3 · Source 4

Tension between the centre and the bases

The party centre in Shanghai still held urban insurrection to be orthodox. In 1930 Li Lisan proclaimed a “revolutionary high tide” and ordered the Red Army against Changsha, Wuhan and Nanchang. Peng Dehuai’s troops held Changsha for ten days in July before being driven out, and the Comintern recalled Li to Moscow. In January 1931 the “28 Bolsheviks” around Wang Ming, backed by Pavel Mif, took over the centre. Source 5 · Source 6

There was violence inside the bases too. In December 1930 part of the 20th Army in Jiangxi mutinied against the purge of the “AB (Anti-Bolshevik) League”; Mao’s front committee suppressed it and thousands were executed afterwards. The Futian incident was the first case of power struggle and purge in the bases. At the Ningdu conference of 1932 Mao lost military command and was sidelined into government work, and when the centre moved from Shanghai to Ruijin in 1933 Bo Gu and the Comintern adviser Otto Braun took charge of the army. Source 4 · Source 7)

Ruijin: the experiment in statehood

On 7 November 1931, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the provisional central government of the Chinese Soviet Republic was proclaimed at Ruijin with Mao as chairman. Its land law confiscated landlord land for the poor and “restricted” rich peasants; its marriage law established freedom of divorce and banned purchase marriage. In a base of three million people it experimented with taxation, banking, schools and elections. Source 4 · Source 8

From late 1930 Chiang Kai-shek launched the encirclement campaigns. The first four (1930–1933) were defeated by the Red Army’s tactics of luring and annihilating. In the fifth, begun in October 1933, the Nationalists on German advice tightened a blockhouse cordon step by step, and Bo Gu and Braun answered with positional defence “outside the gates”, wasting the army. By summer 1934 the loss of the base was a matter of time. Source 9 · Source 10

The Long March: from escape to strategic movement

On the night of 16 October 1934 the Central Red Army of 86,000 left Ruijin, leaving behind the wounded and sick such as Qu Qiubai and Chen Yi’s guerrillas. The overloaded column moved slowly, and in early December, crossing the Xiang River in Guangxi under attack from Nationalist and provincial troops, it lost more than half its strength. The disaster brought the discontent with Bo Gu and Braun to a head. Source 10 · Source 11

The enlarged Politburo meeting at Zunyi, Guizhou, in January 1935 condemned Braun’s military leadership and raised Mao to the Standing Committee; soon a three-man military group of Mao, Zhou Enlai and Wang Jiaxiang took command. The Red Army then crossed the Chishui River four times to confuse pursuit, swung through Yunnan and crossed the Jinsha in May. The Zunyi Conference was later canonised as the beginning of Mao’s leadership, though the actual shift of power took years to complete. Source 12 · Source 10

Snow mountains, grasslands and Zhang Guotao

After forcing the iron-chain bridge at Luding on the Dadu River in late May and crossing the Jiajin snow mountains in June, the Red Army met Zhang Guotao’s Fourth Front Army of 80,000 at Maogong in western Sichuan. Zhang, with ten times the troops, demanded a reshuffle of the leadership, and Mao’s plan to march north toward Shaanxi and the anti-Japanese front clashed with Zhang’s to go west into the wilds of Sichuan and Xikang. In September the two armies parted and Zhang proclaimed a rival “centre”. Source 13 · Source 14

Mao’s force crossed the marshes of the grasslands, broke through Lazikou in September and on 19 October reached Liu Zhidan’s base at Wuqi in northern Shaanxi. Zhang Guotao, turning south, was defeated in Sichuan and marched north the following year; the three front armies united at Huining in October 1936, ending the Long March. The Western Route Army of 20,000 that Zhang sent west was destroyed by the Ma warlords in the Hexi Corridor. The split ended with Zhang’s defection in 1938. Source 10 · Source 15

The Xi’an Incident and the united front

In August 1935 the Comintern’s Seventh Congress resolved on the anti-fascist united front, and the Chinese party’s “August First Declaration” proposed ending the civil war to resist Japan. Chiang, however, held to “internal pacification before external resistance” and sent Zhang Xueliang’s Northeastern Army, driven from Manchuria, against the Shaanxi base. Its soldiers wanted a war with Japan to recover their homes, and the Communists made secret contact with them. Source 16 · Source 17

Before dawn on 12 December 1936 troops of Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng seized Chiang at Huaqing Pool outside Xi’an and presented eight demands: end the civil war, resist Japan, release political prisoners. Nanjing’s hardliners wanted a punitive expedition; Moscow demanded Chiang’s release, arguing that his death would benefit only Japan. Zhou Enlai came to mediate, and Chiang was freed on the 25th after verbally promising to halt the civil war. Zhang Xueliang followed him to Nanjing and into half a century of house arrest, and when war with Japan broke out in July 1937 the second united front was formed. Source 16 · Source 18

Myth and history

The Long March became known to the world through Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China (1936), and the party mythologised it as “a manifesto, a propaganda force, a seeding machine” (Mao). The twenty-two heroes of Luding Bridge and the ordeals of snow mountain and grassland became core scenes of the revolutionary narrative, used to teach the “Long March spirit” to later generations, and Mao made it the origin myth of his own leadership. Source 10 · Source 19

Historians have re-examined the scale of the fighting at Luding Bridge, the distance marched (estimates range from 12,500 down to 6,000 kilometres), what the Zunyi Conference actually decided, and the role of provincial warlord politics in a Nationalist pursuit that “drove out but did not destroy” the Red Army. What is certain is that the party survived, and that at Yan’an in the late 1930s Mao fused this narrative of survival with his own line. Source 10 · Source 12