Chinese Soviet Republic
중화소비에트공화국
The Communist state proclaimed by the First National Soviet Congress at Ruijin, Jiangxi, on 7 November 1931. It bound together scattered rural bases around the Jiangxi Soviet, with Mao Zedong as both chairman of the Central Executive Committee and chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. At its peak in 1933 it governed more than 3.4 million people over some 70,000 square kilometres, but it lost Jiangxi to the fifth encirclement campaign in 1934 and survived after the Long March in northern Shaanxi. It was dissolved on 22 September 1937 under the second united front and became the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region.
In depth
After the CCP's Sixth Congress of 1928 told rural cadres to organise soviet governments, soviets sprang up from 1929. Besides the central base on the Jiangxi–Fujian border there were Eyuwan, Honghu, Minzhegan, Hailufeng, Shaanxi–Gansu and others, never connected, and communications were so poor that Eyuwan, the second largest, could not even send delegates to the 1931 congress. The republic had its own bank, currency and tax bureau, ran schools and courts, and its regular army passed 140,000 in the early 1930s.
Its most important policy was land redistribution. Mao's "How to Differentiate the Classes in the Rural Areas" (1933) set the criteria of class, the marriage law protected free marriage against arranged marriage, and an Outline Constitution was enacted in 1934. At the same time there was violence: the anti-AB purge and the Futian Incident, and mass executions and labour conscription as the loss of the base approached. The population of the Jiangxi Soviet's fifteen counties fell by some 700,000 between 1931 and 1936, and how to divide the causes between the soviet regime and the Nationalist campaigns and blockade is disputed.
Politically the republic was the stage on which the relation between the Shanghai centre and the bases was reversed. Mao lost his military command at the Ningdu Conference of 1932, and in 1933 Bo Gu's provisional centre and the Comintern adviser Otto Braun arrived at Ruijin and took power. When their positional warfare failed against the blockhouses of the fifth encirclement campaign, the Red Army set out on the Long March in October 1934, and the republic lived on in name at Bao'an and Yan'an until its dissolution in 1937. As head of state Mao gained experience in base administration and peasant organisation.