New Fourth Army incident
완난 사변
The destruction in January 1941 of the New Fourth Army’s headquarters column, some nine thousand men moving from southern Anhui (Wannan) to the north of the Yangtze, by 80,000 Nationalist troops who surrounded it. The commander Ye Ting was detained when he went to negotiate, the deputy Xiang Ying was killed while escaping, and only about two thousand broke out. When Chiang cancelled the army’s designation on 17 January, the second united front ended in substance.
In depth
In the autumn of 1940 Chiang ordered the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies to move out of Anhui and Jiangsu to the north of the Yellow River. The Communists agreed only to move the headquarters in Wannan to the north bank of the Yangtze, and on 4 January 1941 the headquarters troops set out from Yunling in Jing County. Surrounded on 5 January around Maolin by Nationalist forces under Shangguan Yunxiang, the column was broken after days of fighting, with many non-combatants of the political department among the dead. On the 13th Ye Ting went to Shangguan’s headquarters to negotiate and was detained.
Responsibility is still disputed. The Republic of China treats it as punishment for the New Fourth Army’s insubordination and its attack on Han Deqin’s Nationalist troops; the People’s Republic as planned Nationalist treachery. The historian Gregor Benton notes both that the Kuomintang may have wanted to push the Communist troops into harm’s way and out of its jurisdiction, and that the New Fourth Army had attacked first.
The Communists rebuilt the New Fourth Army around Chen Yi and Liu Shaoqi on 20 January and gained in public opinion by portraying a Kuomintang that started civil war. From then on the two parties blockaded each other while keeping only the name of cooperation. Mao Dun’s novel Fushi is about the incident.