Li Lisan line
리리싼 노선
The line of 1930 under which Li Lisan, the CCP's de facto leader, citing a "rising revolutionary tide", ordered the Red Army to attack great cities such as Changsha, Nanchang and Wuhan in order to spark a national revolution through urban risings. Peng Dehuai's troops held Changsha for about a week, but no workers' rising followed and a second attack on Changsha failed. The Comintern condemned Li for defying its directives and for ideological deviation and recalled him to Moscow, and the failure moved the party's strategy from the cities to rural bases.
In depth
After 1927 the Communists were nearly wiped out in the cities, and by 1928 75 per cent of party members were peasants. During the 1929 Chinese Eastern Railway conflict the Comintern sent instructions in October speaking of a "rising revolutionary tide", and Li Lisan, effectively party leader since 1928, reasoned that rural armies striking the great cities would set off workers' risings, a national revolution and even a worldwide chain of revolutions. At a Politburo meeting in Shanghai on 9–11 June 1930 a plan for nationwide urban insurrection centred on Wuhan was drawn up ("join forces at Wuhan and water our horses in the Yangtze"), and the Red Army swore an oath of loyalty to the party centre. Mao and Zhu De favoured encircling cities first and complied slowly and reluctantly.
On 25 July Peng Dehuai's Third Corps attacked Changsha, beat a force under He Jian four times its size and took the city on 27 or 29 July, but no workers' rising followed, foreign gunboats shelled the city, and it withdrew on 3 August. Mao and Zhu's First Corps made a symbolic attack on Nanchang and pulled back. A second attack on Changsha in September by the combined First Front Army failed before Nationalist reinforcements and gunboats, and the Red Army had to settle for taking Ji'an in October. Moscow had been sending letters against urban insurrection since July, and in late August Li cancelled the attacks on Wuhan and Shanghai.
The Third Plenum of September halted the line, and in November a Comintern letter condemned Li's deviation and defiance of its directives; he was recalled to Moscow in December. Pavel Mif then reorganised the leadership and the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks took control. The failure of the Li Lisan line let Mao's strategy of rural bases gain influence, and the concentration of units for the assaults on cities made the Red Army a more professional force under a single headquarters. The attack on Changsha also turned Chiang Kai-shek's attention to the Communist armed forces in earnest.