Gao Gang

In late 1935 the Northwest base was consumed by an internal crackdown known as sufan. The Party history outlet of the People's Daily states that emissaries sent from the center, including Zhu Lizhi and Nie Hongjun, branded Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang right opportunists; in early October 1935 the Northwest Security Bureau moved against the leading cadres of the 26th and 27th Red Armies and of the former Northwest Work Committee and Military Committee, arresting Liu Zhidan, Xi Zhongxun, Yang Sen, Huang Luobin, Liu Jingfan and Ma Wenrui, while Gao Gang, then political director of the 15th Army Corps, was lured into arrest soon after the battle of Laoshan. Detainees were tortured, and the same outlet states that more than two hundred Party, government and military cadres of the Northwest were killed, a figure resting on that account alone and not cross-checked against an independent source. The center's wireless order to halt arrests, examinations and executions was issued after Red Army units reached the north of Shaanxi at the end of the Long March, and on 7 November 1935 the Central Party Affairs Committee released Liu Zhidan, Gao Gang, Zhang Xiushan, Xi Zhongxun and 18 people in the first batch. Gao and others freed in this way credited the CCP Center with saving them from the purge.

Rehabilitation was not immediate. The same account records a scrutiny decision on the purge on 26 November 1935 and a declaration at a Party activists' meeting on 30 November, but academic research on the matter reports that the November decision went no further than establishing that the accused were not counterrevolutionaries: Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang were left bearing the label of serious right deviation, and victims continued to face political discrimination and organizational exclusion. That scholarship places the full political rehabilitation in the Northwest high cadres' conference of October 1942 to January 1943, where the CCP Center issued a decision re-examining the 1935 Shaanbei purge and annulled the erroneous content of the November 1935 decision. Chinese-language Wikipedia, by contrast, records only that Gao was posted to Inner Mongolia's Sanbian area from January 1936. The claim that a March 1936 decision of the Center's Northwest Bureau cleared him fully is therefore unsupported and is not asserted here.

After Liu Zhidan fell in battle in 1936, Gao became the representative figure of the Northwest base in the Party and advanced on Mao Zedong's trust, and in May 1941 he took over the CCP Center's Northwest Bureau, one of the four central bureaus of the time. In the rectification campaign that opened in 1942 he sat on the central committee directing the campaign, yet was himself criticized for distorting the history of the Northwest and claiming credit for the achievements of others. His authority then shifted from the Northwest to Manchuria. Arriving in Shenyang in November 1945, Gao opposed the Northeastern Bureau majority's plan to seize the big cities first, arguing that the Soviet Union would hand Shenyang and other major cities to the Kuomintang under its treaty with that government and that the Party should instead build rural base areas. Chen Yun and Zhang Wentian backed him; the three sent a joint telegram to the center, which endorsed the approach on 9 December. When Lin Biao became secretary of the Northeastern Bureau in June 1946, Gao became deputy secretary and secretary-general handling its daily work, and in 1948 he served as first deputy commander and deputy political commissar of the Northeast Military Region.

In February 1949 he headed the Party, government and military apparatus of the Northeast as secretary of its bureau, chairman of the Northeast Administrative Committee and commander and commissar of the Northeast Military Region. According to the Russian-language Wikipedia, he joined the delegation Liu Shaoqi led to the Soviet Union that year and proposed to Stalin that Manchuria be proclaimed a seventeenth union republic in the event of Anglo-American military intervention; Stalin refused.

Sources differ on the dates of the 1935 Shaanbei purge arrests and releases. The People's Daily Party history account gives the arrests as occurring in early October and the first releases as 7 November, while the English and Russian Wikipedia articles date the episode only to 1935; the Russian article's November 1936 date conflicts with its own account of the Long March's arrival, so no exact year is asserted here.