Bo Gu

Bo Gu took charge of the Party center in Shanghai in the autumn of 1931, amid the successive destruction of the Party's underground organization there. In late April Gu Shunzhang and Xiang Zhongfa were arrested and the Shanghai underground was broken up; in early September Zhou Enlai and Wang Ming came to Bo Gu's residence to tell him that Zhou would take the secretaryship of the Central Soviet Area and Wang the leadership of the Comintern's Chinese delegation, leaving Bo Gu to preside over the center. A Provisional Central Committee was formed without a general secretary, with Bo Gu "bearing overall responsibility." After Chen Shaoyu (Wang Ming) and Zhou Enlai left Shanghai in succession on 18 October of that year, the 24-year-old Bo Gu became head of the Provisional Central Committee, whose Political Bureau took direct guidance from the Comintern representative in Shanghai and continued to carry out the line of the Fourth Plenum.

What marked this leadership above all was its dependence on Comintern instructions. The Mukden Incident of 18 September 1931 transformed China's political situation, but the Provisional Center could not analyze it independently and continued to execute Comintern directives faithfully. The "Resolution of the Central Committee on Winning First Victory in One or Several Provinces," which Bo Gu spoke on and drafted at the Standing Committee meeting of 18 December 1931 and which was issued on 9 January 1932, carried the Comintern's leftist errors into practice: attacks on intermediate forces, the copying of Soviet experience, emphasis on urban uprisings, and the wrongful arrest or criticism of Party members.

When the Shanghai underground was broken up again in December 1932 and Standing Committee member Lu Futan and others were arrested and defected, putting Zhang Wentian and Chen Yun in danger of arrest, Bo Gu reported to the Comintern and decided to move the central leadership wholesale to the Jiangxi Central Soviet Area. After moving to Ruijin in January of the following year, he merged the central organs into a new CCP Central Bureau and served as its head. In early 1933, Luo Ming, then acting secretary of the Fujian Provincial Committee, met Bo Gu as the center moved to the Central Soviet Area and told him that the Provisional Center's instructions had not reached the lower levels. Bo Gu drafted the "Decision of the Central Bureau on the Fujian-Guangdong-Jiangxi Provincial Committee," branded "Luo Mingism" opportunism, and launched the campaign against the "Luo Ming line," in which large numbers of grassroots and front-line cadres were implicated and dismissed, including Zhang Dingcheng, Liu Xiao, Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zetan, Xie Weijun and Gu Bai; the decision was issued on 15 February 1933. With the front under pressure, however, the militarily inexperienced Bo Gu could only rely on front-line commanders such as Zhu De and Zhou Enlai.

On military questions Bo Gu, trusting the Comintern completely, gave a free hand in decision-making to the adviser Li De (Otto Braun), sent to the Central Soviet Area in the autumn of 1933. Braun, a veteran of the European battlefield, did not understand the Chinese battlefield and could not work with Zhou Enlai and others. In the Fujian Incident that winter, when Peng Dehuai proposed supporting Fujian, Bo Gu and Braun held that Cai Tingkai and others could not be trusted and issued "The Fujian Incident and Our Tasks," refusing support. Braun's insistence on a decisive battle at Guangchang cost the Red Army heavily, and the opposition of Peng Dehuai and Zhang Wentian made the conflict within the core leadership public.

At the Fifth Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee, held in Ruijin, Jiangxi, from 15 to 18 January 1934, Bo Gu was elected General Secretary of the CCP Central Committee. In May of that year a meeting of the Central Secretariat in Ruijin settled on withdrawing the main forces from the Central Soviet Area, and Bo Gu, Zhou Enlai and Braun formed the "three-man group" that directed military decisions. Following Braun's command too closely, the group crossed the fourth blockade line and suffered devastating defeat at the Xiang River, losing thirty thousand troops. An emergency meeting on 11 December 1934 at Gongcheng Academy in Xizhen, western Hunan, endorsed Mao Zedong's proposal to move toward weakly defended Guizhou; the Red Army commanders, unclear about the aim of the Long March, decided to settle it after taking Zunyi. At the Zunyi Conference in January 1935, which Bo Gu chaired, he reported first, reviewing the military command errors of the fifth counter-encirclement campaign but attributing them chiefly to objective difficulties; Zhou Enlai then reported that the errors were strategic and tactical ones of military leadership and took responsibility himself; Zhang Wentian followed with a report against the Central Committee's purely defensive military line, and Mao Zedong spoke at length. Over three days of meetings Bo Gu, though not fully convinced, submitted to the majority out of Party discipline. The conference abolished the three-man group, made Zhu De and Zhou Enlai the military commanders, and co-opted Mao Zedong onto the Politburo Standing Committee; Bo Gu thereby lost actual leadership of the Party. On 5 February 1935, at the Politburo meeting in Jimingsansheng village, Zhang Wentian replaced Bo Gu as General Secretary, and that afternoon Bo Gu handed over the seals of the Central Committee and of the Politburo Secretariat, the Central Secretary's stamp, and the porter's load of central documents, through Zhou Enlai, to Zhang Wentian. As a transitional arrangement he retained his seat on the Politburo Standing Committee.