Chair of the founding congress who split with Mao on the Long March and defected to the Nationalists
At the 1935 Long March reunion he insisted on turning south to Sichuan rather than north to Shaanxi. Losing over 75% of his 80,000 troops discredited him in his army and Comintern.
A Peking University student leader in May Fourth, he chaired the party’s founding congress in 1921. After years of labour organising he went to the Eyuwan Soviet in 1931 and became political leader of the Fourth Front Army, which met Mao’s Central Red Army in Sichuan on the Long March in 1935. Clashing with Mao over marching north or west, he set up a rival “centre” and turned south, lost much of his army, and rejoined at Yan’an in 1936. Criticised in 1937, he fled to the Nationalist zone in 1938 and was expelled; he later wrote his memoirs in Hong Kong and Canada and died in Toronto.
Also known as: Chang Kuo-tao
Activities and affiliations
-
1920–1938
Political and party leadership
- Director of the China Labour Secretariat1921–1927Social movements and organizing
- Head of the Eyuwan Soviet1931–1935
-
1924–
Political and party leadership
-
1935–1936
Chinese Communist revolutionary forces (before 1949)General Political Commissar of the Red Army
Military command -
1938–1948
Republic of China state institutions
Security, intelligence and policing
Career Timeline
- 1916–1920Studied at Peking University under Li Dazhao; student leader in the May Fourth Movement
- 1920.10Joined the early Communist organisation in Beijing
- 1921–1923Director of the China Labour Secretariat and editor of Labour Weekly; led railway and textile strikes
- 1921.07Chaired the First National Congress of the CCP; Central Bureau member in charge of organisation
- 1924.01Elected alternate member of the KMT Central Executive Committee at its First Congress
- 1925Central Committee member and head of the Labour and Peasant Department at the Fourth Congress
- 1928–1930Politburo member at the Sixth Congress; CCP delegate to the Comintern
- 1931–1935Leader of the Eyuwan Soviet and the Fourth Front Army
- 1935.06–10General Political Commissar of the Red Army after Lianghekou; went south and set up a rival "Central Committee"
- 1937.03Censured at an enlarged Politburo meeting; acting chairman of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region from September
- 1938.04Fled Yan'an to the KMT; expelled on 18 April; anti-Communist work for the Juntong
- 1949–1968Lived in Hong Kong; emigrated to Toronto in 1968
Related historical events
- 1915–1921May Fourth and the founding of the Chinese Communist PartyMay Fourth student leader and congress chairmanLed the Peking University students and chaired the First Congress.
- 1924–1927The first united front, the Northern Expedition and the catastrophe of 1927Member of the five-man provisional leadership of 1927Formed the provisional leadership with Zhou Enlai, Li Lisan and others after Chen Duxiu stepped down.
- 1927–1936From Jinggangshan to Yan’an: the soviet bases and the Long MarchFourth Front Army leader who split with MaoSet up a rival “centre” in 1935, went south and rejoined in 1936.
The Eyuwan Soviet and the Purges
In 1931 Zhang was sent to the Eyuwan Soviet on the border of Hubei, Henan, and Anhui. The party was then digesting the failure of the Li Lisan line and trying to bring the scattered rural soviets under more centralised control, and Zhang was given that task. He immediately clashed with the leadership of the Fourth Red Army. Xu Jishen and the other commanders wanted to seize the breadbasket counties of eastern Hubei to relieve Eyuwan's chronic food shortages; Zhang criticised the plan as matching Li Lisan's "adventurism". When the commanders disobeyed his orders and took the land anyway, he obtained the Central Committee's permission to appoint Chen Changhao political commissar of the Fourth Red Army, and the two then declared that the army behaved like a "warlord-bandit" force that pillaged the countryside and rejected discipline, purging hundreds of alleged traitors. Xu Jishen was among them.
The purges widened in the second half of 1931: thousands or tens of thousands of party members were arrested and accused of belonging to the Reorganizationists, the Anti-Bolshevik League, or the Third Party, and in some counties Zhang set up secret police. His stated justification was that the local party was too closely intertwined with the gentry and the traditional rural power structure, which he said had prevented proper land reform, and land reform under him did go much further than in previous years. The purges nevertheless provoked opposition from wide sections of the party and the peasantry and ended in the latter half of 1932.
The scale of the arrests and killings is still disputed. Reasonable estimates run from the low thousands to 10,000. William Rowe argues that the purges "meant... the near final extinction of the Party's base of indigenous supporters" in Eyuwan, but most other historians disagree: Benton notes that almost all of the purged cadres were replaced with other local supporters, and Saich argues that the Red Army's continued success shows the purges had not damaged its fighting capacity. In early 1932 the Fourth Red Army helped defeat the Third Encirclement Campaign and reached 30,000 soldiers, but that year the Nationalists' fourth encirclement campaign broke the base and forced it to move west.