Futian Incident
푸톈 사변
The mutiny of part of the 20th Red Army at Futian in December 1930 against the purge of the "AB League" (Anti-Bolshevik League) in the Jiangxi Soviet, and the executions of the 20th Army's officers that followed. When a purge commission sent by Mao Zedong's General Front Committee arrested and tortured local Jiangxi cadres as Nationalist agents, the unit rose with the cry "Down with Mao Zedong!". After Wang Ming's centre declared it a "counter-revolutionary rebellion" in 1931, its leaders and more than 700 officers were executed, and the anti-AB campaign spread across the Jiangxi Soviet.
In depth
The AB League was a Kuomintang group formed in 1926 to contest control of the Jiangxi party with the Communists; it had collapsed by April 1927. In autumn 1930 local cadres in south-western Jiangxi, supporters of the Li Lisan line, opposed Mao's strategy of "luring the enemy in deep", and Mao moved to purge them as AB members. In December Li Shaojiu, head of the purge commission, arrested more than 120 officers of the 20th Red Army and the Jiangxi Action Committee at Futian and executed seventeen, and on 12 December the 1st Battalion of the 174th Regiment mutinied, withdrew to Yongyang and appealed to the Central Committee in Shanghai.
The centre's verdict wavered. In January 1931 Xiang Ying, acting secretary of the Central Bureau of the Soviet Areas, called it an "unprincipled factional struggle" and expelled Li Shaojiu, but in March Ren Bishi, Wang Jiaxiang and Gu Zuolin, sent by Wang Ming's centre, declared it a "counter-revolutionary rebellion". The 20th Army leaders who came to negotiate in April were arrested and executed, and in July troops under Peng Dehuai and Lin Biao surrounded the 20th Army, executed more than 700 officers from deputy platoon leader up and abolished its designation. The purge grew harsher still; in some areas 80 to 90 per cent of party officials were branded AB members.
The toll has never been settled. One account has some 70,000 killed in the purges of 1930–1931, a figure many studies reject. Mao admitted errors in the purges in 1945 and 1956; a re-investigation begun in 1980 on Hu Yaobang's instructions produced a report in early 1989 recommending full rehabilitation, which went unpublished after 4 June. The CCP accepts that most victims of the anti-AB campaign were innocent but has not formally rehabilitated the Futian Incident itself.