From Revolution To Politics

Chinese Communists On The Long March

Benjamin Yang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367012823
• eBook ISBN: 9780429713576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Landeskunde

Providing fresh analysis of the history and politics of Chinese communism, this book utilizes previously inaccessible sources to reassess the epic Long March. It sheds new light on the revolutionary momentum and political structure of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s.

1 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9780429042683-1

How many prominent scholars and politicians have attempted to characterize the essence or zeitgeist of the contemporary world? It has been ascribed a host of labels, including "the age of crisis," "the age of reconstruction," "the age of proletarian revolution," and "the age of disorder under Heaven." I would propose that our age should still be understood essentially in terms of the political confrontation between capitalism and communism, despite the archaistic hues the two terms may carry. Indeed, there are few crucial issues in our world that cannot be shown to relate, directly or indirectly, to such confrontation.¹

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plays a particularly conspicuous role in international communism in at least two respects. First, the CCP represents a country with one tenth the land mass, one fifth the population, and one half the organized Communists on earth. More important, the CCP has emerged as a distinctive outgrowth of the Communist movement. It followed a unique path to the victory of revolution, debated sharply with and then split from the Soviet Union, and is now advocating a dramatic reform policy known as "open door to the world" and "two systems in one country." Simply put, it has become an indicator of a fundamental change in the Communist world.

Historical studies serve as one of the most convenient approaches to understanding the CCP's emergence as a unique variant of communism. It is particularly interesting to investigate the mid-1950s—the period of the Long March—in which the CCP went through a process of drastic transformation: hundreds of thousands of Communist troops traveled thousands of miles from South China to North China; and the Communist Party went through a basic change in status and character. The importance of the Long March can hardly be overemphasized, either historically or politically. Older Communist leaders have frequently referred to it as a turning point in CCP history; even now, fifty years later, survivors of the Long March are still in control of China, as I have shown statistically elsewhere²; and new Chinese leaders are calling their drive for economic modernization the "New Long March." The Long March has become a symbol of CCP history, just as the Great Wall is a hallmark of ancient Chinese civilization. The importance of the Long March as subject matter also stems from the fact that although this extraordinary epic has drawn much admiration from military commentators and journalists (among whom Harrison Salisbury is the latest and most reliable in view of historical accuracy), few serious academic works have yet dealt with it, either in China or the West.³

Definitions

While it was under way in late 1934 and early 1935, the Long March had not yet been so named. The Communists called it the "Western Expedition," because the Central Red Army was withdrawing from its Soviet base in Jiangxi province and moving toward the western provinces.⁴ In the eyes of the antagonistic Kuomintang (KMT) army, what the Communists were doing could only be mockingly regarded as the "Western Flight."⁵ Ironically, the first appearance of the term Long March, or changzheng, was in a speech of Chiang Kai-shek referring to his Nationalist troops in pursuit of the Communists. According to Xue Yue—the KMT general who commanded the Second Route Army to have pursued the Central Red Army all the way from Jiangxi in October 1934 to Sichuan in June 1935—Chiang made the following remarks of approbation after Xue had finished his duty: "Throughout Chinese history, no army whatsoever has ever before been recorded as completing such a Long March of more than 20,000 li. Now we have one, and this is achieved by none other than our Second Route Army."⁶

As for the Communists, it was only a few months after the Central Red Army, or the First Front Army, concluded its part of the Long March that Mao Zedong began to adopt the term. In his famous speech after the Wayaobao Conference, Mao said: "Speaking of the Long March, one may ask: What is its significance? We answer that the Long March is the very first throughout Chinese history, that it is a manifesto, a propaganda team, and a seeding machine.... A new situation emerged soon after the Long March ended."⁷ These statements not only marked the introduction of the term Long March into the Communist lexicon, but also demonstrated that Mao considered the arrival of his own Central Red Army in northern Shaanxi the conclusion of the Long March, even though while he was making this speech in late December 1935, two other Red Army groups were still struggling to complete their own Long Marches.

Whether out of respect for historical reality or simply for political purposes—since the Long March soon became a symbol of honor and glory for the entire Party and Army, and hence for all those involved—the later official account extended the duration of the Long March to October 1936 in order to include the expeditions of the Second and Fourth Front Armies. The starting date of the Long March nevertheless remains the date when the First Front Army set forth from the Jiangxi Soviet. In the official version, therefore, the Long March is now dated from October 1934 to October 1936.⁸

A logical problem, however, must be brought up. If the Long March pertains not only to the First Front Army but also to other Red Armies, then not merely one but several Long Marches were undertaken. The starting date of the Long March, considered as a general historical period, must be accordingly modified. As a matter of fact, Zhang Guotao's Fourth Front Army and He Long's Third Army left their original base areas, the Eyuwan Soviet and the Xiangexi Soviet respectively, and embarked on their military expeditions as early as October 1932 as a result of the KMT's Fourth Suppression Campaign. As some historians have legitimately argued, this should be regarded as the real beginning of the Long March.⁹

The end date for the Long March is no less controversial. The union of the three Red Army groups at eastern Gansu in October 1936 did not necessarily mean the conclusion of the Long March, because simultaneously 20,000 Red Army troops—which constituted two thirds of the Fourth Front Army and almost one half of the entire Red Army—were just crossing the Yellow River and setting forth on the "Western March" toward Xinjiang. After undergoing extreme difficulties and hardships, this Western Route Army was eventually destroyed in Gansu in early 1937. Unless success should be taken as the prerequisite for inclusion, the Long March should not be considered as ended until this moment. For all these reasons, the Long March is defined in this study as a historical event spanning the period from late 1932 to early 1937.

Leaving concrete dates and events aside, the Long March can be defined in a broader and more abstract sense. It can be understood as an event in which the Chinese Communists went through an overall transfer from South China to North China. Not merely a single episode involving a single Communist group for a brief period, it included a complex series of events involving all major Communist forces over an extended span of time. Although the highlight of the Long March is doubtless the performance of Mao's Central Red Army between its departure from Jiangxi and its arrival in Shaanxi, the earlier withdrawals of other Red Armies from their base areas should be included as the indispensable prologue, and the destiny of the Western Route Army as the epilogue to this historical event. In the ensuing chapters, the term Long March will generally be used in this broad sense. It comprises a number of discrete 'Long Marches' conducted by several different Red Army groups from the autumn of 1932 to the spring of 1937.

Themes

Two basic questions, whether explicitly raised or not, can be found in almost all the previous literature on CCP history and politics in general and that of the 1930s in particular: What caused the Communist Party's rise to power in China and Mao Zedong's rise to power within the Communist Party? What made the Soviet movement rise and then fall in the 1930s and Mao, concurrently, fall and then rise? Answers proposed to these questions have been divergent and even contradictory.

Although he is primarily interested in studies of the CCP during the Sino-Japanese War, Chalmers Johnson, in his pioneer work on relationships between peasant nationalism and the Communist Party, attempts to interpret the CCP's earlier defeats and later successes in a general sense. Professor Johnson writes:

In other words, from 1921 to 1937 Communists failed in China because the Chinese people, in general, were indifferent to what the Communist Party had to offer. After 1937, it succeeded because the population became receptive to one particular kind of political appeal; and the Communist Party—in one of its many disguises—made precisely that appeal: it offered to meet the needs of the people for leadership in organizing resistance to the invader and in alleviating war-induced anarchy in the rural areas.¹⁰

Ilpyong Kim, another influential author, offers a rather different explanation. In his book on Communist politics in the Jiangxi Soviet in the early 1930s, Kim concludes that "the Communist leaders of the Kiangsi Soviet period were successful in creating and operating an effective political system and in mobilizing the peasant masses under the Soviet rule," and their "evacuation of the Kiangsi Soviet base in 1934 probably was primarily the consequence of military failure, not of a lack of mass support."¹¹

Both factual and logical problems can be found in Johnson's argument. It can hardly be taken for granted, first of all, that the entire 1921 to 1937 period was a simple failure for the Communists, either in view of the CCP's periodic upsurges in 1921-1926, 1928-1933 and 1936-1937 or in view of its general growth in strength throughout the period. Moreover, given that the CCP witnessed a steady growth between 1937 and 1949, the Liberation War (1946-49) may not be taken simply as a smooth extension of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), nor was it simply, as Johnson says, that "as a result of the Communist Party's leadership of the resistance, the Party obtained a mass following that it subsequently used to conquer all of China"—but this discussion will be better supported in the final chapter.¹² Finally, in a war period such as the 1930s, mass support, a vague term in itself, is only an indirect and quantitative factor. It must be transformed into the overall political and military strength, if it is to become decisive for one warring side or the other. Instead of considering it as a direct factor (following this line of inference, one may arrive at an even more provocative notion that the victorious KMT must have enjoyed more mass support than the defeated CCP in the early 1930s), mass support must be seen as playing into the overall military contest with the KMT in deciding the destiny of the CCP.

The Communists' evacuation from the Jiangxi Soviet in 1934 was apparently a consequence of their military failure. Problematically, Kim prefers a clear-cut distinction between political conditions and military affairs. He seems to believe that the Communist leaders of the Jiangxi Soviet succeeded politically but failed militarily. This is actually a position the CCP leaders maintained in early 1935; they later changed their opinion. While granting military affairs due importance, one should not ignore how and to what extent the military process was shaped by Communist policies of mass mobilization, social organization, administrative operations, ideological propaganda, and enemy disintegration. More generally speaking, the relationship between the political line and the military line should be under question.

In his classic study of the Communist Party and the rise of Mao, Benjamin Schwartz attempts to outline the basic strategy by which Mao brought the Communist Party to success. Under circumstances defined by incessant splits and wars within the ruling classes, and given the existence of a mass base, a Communist Party organization, a Red Army, favorable terrain, and sufficient economic resources, an autonomous regime of the Communist Party could not only survive but also grow. These ideas, as expressed in a report by Mao to the Party Center in 1928, are regarded by Schwartz as the main features of Mao's strategy in the Jiangxi Soviet years.¹³ Although it underwent some statesmanlike refinement, according to Schwartz, Mao changed little in the basic strategy in later years. Schwartz connects this outline with Communist success in China, saying: "Such, I think, are the main lines of the strategy which, in conjuncture with favorable external circumstances, was finally to lead the Chinese Communists to victory."¹⁴

Nevertheless, a number of historians hold different views on this issue, believing that the strategy of Mao and the Communist Party between the Jiangxi Soviet period and the Sino-Japanese War changed significantly. Shanti Swarup ascribes the CCP failure in the Jiangxi Soviet to its excessive social programs and its success in the Anti-Japanese War to a combination of social and national revolutions.¹⁵ Similarly, Tetsuya Kataoka attributes the Communist victory in the late 1930s and the early 1940s as much to the previous strategy of conducting a peasant war and employing the countryside to encircle the city as to the later juxtaposition of both rural and urban lines.¹⁶

Although a more precise definition of Mao's general strategy may be needed, I would agree with Schwartz that Mao's basic opinions on making the Communist revolution in China were already established by the Jiangxi Soviet years, and that there were no fundamental changes after this time. Nonetheless, a few points are worth noting. It should at least be admitted that Mao's position within the Communist Party had risen from that of an ordinary Party and Army leader in Ruijin to that of the dominating figure in Yan'an. Hence, since Mao's strategy became the Party's strategy in the latter period, the Communist Party as a whole must have undergone a shift during the 1930s. Mao's own policy positions, it must be added, had also changed significantly between the early and late 1930s. From rebelling against the KMT to uniting with the KMT, from a slogan of "Soviet government" to a slogan of "people's government," from the policy of land distribution to the policy of rent control—these changes are important enough to be considered strategic. What had not yet changed—and I assume this is also Schwartz's essential argument—was Mao's basic mode of thought, which I would term political realism, in contrast to the revolutionary idealism pursued by the earlier Party leaders. Schwartz alludes to the statesmanlike refinement of the Party's political line in the years following the Long March, and he is certainly right to point out that this change was for the Communists no more than some titular alteration. It was perceived as formal rather than substantive shift.¹⁷

Historical truth, however, does not always lie in historical actors' own perceptions. This case brings to mind the well-known slogan "Chinese learning for substance and Western learning for function" launched by Zhang Zhidong and his Confucian colleagues a century ago regarding national reform in China. It equally seems that Mao and his comrades' united front policy resembled something like "Communist revolution for substance and Chinese politics for function." But just as the former Confucian slogan rose from the historical imperative presented by the substantially superior Western powers, and later history had proved the very opposite view—Western learning became the substance while Chinese learning wa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• List of Tables and Maps Page
• Acknowledgments Page
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Soviet Revolution in South China
• 3 The Fourth Suppression Campaign and the Long March
• 4 The Fifth Suppression Campaign and the Long March
• 5 Military Line Versus Political Line: The Zunyi Conference and the Rise of Mao
• 6 The Army Versus the Party: Encounter of the First and Fourth Front Armies
• 7 Settlement in North China
• 8 Grand Union
• 9 The Prowess of Mao as Political Entrepreneur
• 10 Conclusion: The Long March from Revolution to Politics
• Notes
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index