Gutian Congress
구톈 회의
The Ninth Party Congress of the Fourth Red Army, held at Gutian in Shanghang county, Fujian, in December 1929. Its resolution, drafted by Mao Zedong ("On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party"), set out the party's absolute leadership over the army, a system in which the party's organs in the army are "the central leadership", and the principle that the Red Army does not only fight but also propagandises, organises and arms the masses and helps build revolutionary power. It is still upheld as a founding principle of the People's Liberation Army.
In depth
In June 1929, after internal disputes, Mao was voted out of the leadership at a Fourth Army party congress. In September a letter Zhou Enlai sent on the Central Committee's behalf endorsed Mao's view of an armed worker-peasant regime, "First is the Red Army, and later urban political power. This is characteristic of the Chinese revolution", and defined the Red Army's tasks as mobilising mass struggle, agrarian revolution and building soviets, guerrilla war and arming the peasants, and expanding the guerrilla areas. Acting on the letter, the congress met at Gutian in December with Mao in the chair.
The resolution condemned non-proletarian ideas such as the "purely military viewpoint" that set military affairs against politics and refused to see them as a means to political tasks, "ultra-democracy" that put every decision to endless debate, absolute egalitarianism, subjectivism, individualism and the ideology of roving rebel bands. The Red Army was "an armed group that carries out the political work of the revolution", bearing besides the destruction of the enemy the burden of propagandising, organising and arming the masses and helping them build revolutionary power and the party. Party committee decisions were to be resolutely carried out, and democratic centralism, with the minority following the majority and lower levels the higher, was stressed.
The phrase "the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party" is Mao's, from "Problems of War and Strategy" (1938), but Gutian is regarded as the institutional starting point of that principle. Political work and party organisation in the army, and discipline such as the "Three Rules and Eight Points for Attention", became the basis on which the Red Army, unlike the warlord armies, won peasant support.