It was the result of the Long March that enables Mao Zedong to establish the Communist control over China. In 1949, after string of military victorious, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China; Chiang Kai-Shek and his forces fled to Taiwan to regroup and plan for their efforts to retake the mainland.
Formation
of Jiangxi Soviet
Jiangxi Soviet or
Chinese Soviet Republic is an independent government established by the
communist leader Mao Zedong and his comrade Zhu De in Jiangxi province in
Southern China. The Chinese Communist party (CCP) allied with Nationalist Party
or Kuomintang (KMT) until 1927, when Chiang Kai-Shek (Jiang Jieshi) purged the
communists from the Kuomintang, Mao and Zhu De were the head of small band of
communist soldiers and they retreated to mountainous countryside.
In January 1929, Mao decided to look for a better-supplied
base area that would be less vulnerable to Nationalist attacks. His choice was
a border region between Jiangxi and Fujian, where he set up what came to be
called the Jiangxi (jyahng-shee) Soviet[2]. Mao
gained experience on guerilla warfare and peasant organization in this small
state which later enables him to conquer the whole mainland of China by the end
of 1940s.
Jiangxi was the
largest territory of the Chinese Soviet Republic. The Jiangxi-Fujian base area
was protected by the First Red army front. But in 1934, it was overrun by the
Kuomintang (KMT) government’s National Revolutionary army in the 5th
of its Encirclement campaigns. This last campaign in 1934-35 precipitated the
most famous of the grand retreats known collectively as the ‘Long March’.
On the anniversary of the 1917 Russian ‘Bolshevik Revolution’, a National Soviet People's Delegates
Conference was held in Ruijin
with the help of Soviet Union, Jiangxi province.
Ruijin was the county seat and was selected as the capital of the new Soviet
republic. Accordingly, the ‘Chinese Soviet Republic’ was born. However, the
majority of China was still under the control of the nationalist Government of the Republic of
China. They established their own bank, printing
their own money, and collecting tax through their own tax bureau, the modern
Chinese Communist Party considers this as the beginning of Two Chinas. Above all Mao and his army are fearless and ruthless.
In insisting on the correctness of his interpretations and in fighting for his
position within the party, Mao showed a terrifying ruthlessness which remained
a hallmark of his whole career. A fearful example of this was the 'Futian Incident' in 1930 when he conducted
a violent two-month purge of a rival unit within the Jiangxi Red Army, whose
members he suspected of being either KMT agents or supporters of Li Lisan. In
the course of crushing what he regarded as a military and political revolt, Mao
Zedong ordered the torture and execution of nearly 3000 officers and men[3].
Encirclement
Campaign launch by Nationalist under Chiang Kai-Shek
The CCP's internal
rivalries took place against the background of the Nationalists' constant
effort to crush the Jiangxi base[4].Chiang
Kai-shek decided to act against Communist bases immediately after the end of the
War of the Central Plains. Following defeat in the first three suppression
campaigns, the last one of which had nearly succeeded but had to be called off
because of the crisis caused by the Japanese attacks, the Nationalists adopted
a new strategy, known as ‘three parts military and seven parts civil’[5]. Accordingly, he formed allies with
former Chinese warlords in the creation of National Revolutionary Army and
decided to launch ‘Encirclement Campaign’ between 1930 and 1934.
The Soviet’s First Red Army could defeat the first 3
encirclements using tactic of mobile infiltration and guerilla warfare
developed by Mao. In the next fifth campaign Chiang mustered 700,000 troops and
established a series of cement blockhouses around the communist positions. The Chinese
Central Committee, which has removed Mao from the leadership early in 1934,
abandoned his guerilla warfare strategy and used regular positional warfare
tactics against the better-armed and more numerous Nationalist forces suffered
heavy losses and were nearly crushed. However, the fifth
campaign would have resulted in a defeat for the communists regardless of the
strategy they adopted[6]. The Red army was nearly halved, with
most of its equipment lost during Chiang and Von Seeckt’s Fifth Encirclement
campaign, utilizing fortified blockhouses. Hans von Seeckt was Chiang’s chief
military adviser in this campaign; his presence is a German military mission
and evidence to the close links between the Nationalists (KMT) and Hitler’s
Third Reich. It was Seeckt who drew up plans for reforming Chiang’s army into
60 highly trained divisions[7].
In an effort to break the blockade, the Red Army under the orders of the
three-man committee besieged the forts many times but continued to suffer heavy
casualties with little success at the hands of untrained, untested, and
uncaring leadership. The territories of Jiangxi Soviet decreases rapidly.
The Long March
Chiang hoped to
finally starve out the communists by erecting electric fences to squeeze out
the Soviet but with the leak of crucial intelligence, the communists were able
to extricate themselves, and began a long march out of Jiangxi, hotly pursued
by the KMT [8].
The
journey from Jiangxi to Yanan took a year, from October 1934 to October 1935. Of
the 100,000 who set out scarcely 20,000 survived to reach Yanan[9]. In October 1934 the remaining, 86,000
troops in Jiangxi base broke through the Nationalist lines at their weakest
points and fled westward. Zhu De was the commander of the army and Zhou Enlai
was the political commissar of the party. The first three months of the long march
were disastrous for the communists as Chiang Kai-Shek constantly attack them
through air force and ground troops, they lost more than half of their army.
Morale was low when they arrived in Zunyi, in the southern province of Guizhou,
but at a conference there in January 1935 Mao was able to establish his
dominance of the party. The march then headed towards northwestern China near
the safely of the Soviet Border and close to the territory occupied by Japanese
in Northeastern China.
In june 1935 a force that had been in the Sihchuan Shaanxi
border area under Zhang Guotao, a longtime communist leader, joined the main
army and at Mao’ergai in the northern Sichuan a power struggle ensued between
Mao and Zhang. Zhang’s group accompanied by Zhu De headed towards the extreme
southwestern part of China. The main body under Mao proceeded towards northern
Shaanxi, where the communist leader Gao Gang and Liu Zhidan had built another
base. Mao arrived at this destination in October 1935 along with only 8,000
survivors. Along the route, some communists had left the march to mobilize the
peasantry, but most of the missing had been eliminated by fighting, disease,
and starvation. Among the missing were Mao’s two small children and his younger
brother, Mao Zetan who although he had not been on the Long March, had been a
guerilla fighter in Jiangxi before dying in April 1935.
Mao’s troops joined the local Red Army
contingent of 7,000 men. The subsequent arrival of the other units swelled
total strength by late 1936 to about 30,000 troops. In December 1936 the
communists moved to the nearby district of Yan’an in Shaanxi, where they
remained throughout the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). One of the most
significant outcomes of the long March was the consolidation of Mao’s position
as the leader of the CCP[10]. The
Long March had decisively established Mao’s leadership of the Chinese
Communists Party and had enabled the embattled communists to reach a base at
Yan’an, the communists grew in strength and eventually defeated the
Nationalists in the struggle to control mainland China.
Rise
of Chinese Communist Part (CCP)
Chiang Kai-Shek seemed
slow to respond to the Japanese action as his primary aim was to crush the
Communists. But, one of Chiang’s own general Zhang Xueliang, who was a marshal
of the northeast who fought to stave off Japanese aggression, was unhappy with
his leader’s apparent lack of zeal in resisting the Japanese. He led a mutiny
and Chiang was taken as a prisoner at Xian[11]. Prior
the mutiny, Zhang tried to reason with Chiang to urge him to forge a truce with
the CCP so as to focus attention on Japan. Chiang Kai-Shek disagreed and was
more committed to trouncing the communists. Thus, on December 12, 1936, a
frustrated Zhang kidnapped the Generalissimo, and in the commotion that ensued,
a number of KMT officials were killed[12]. Instead of killing
Chiang, he was handed to the communists. Chiang was offered a deal which cannot
be refused. Thus, it led to the formation of KMT-CCP alliance in December 1936.
The Communist (CCP) could finally spread its wing over the whole of China.
REFERENCES:
Ebrey, Patricia and Walthall, Anne , Modern East Asia: A cultural, Social, and
Political History From 1600, Third Edition, Boston, Wadsworth, 2014.
Van de van, Hans J., War and Nationalism in China, London, Routledge Curzon 2003.
Waller,
Derek j., The Soviet Republic: Mao and
the National Congresses of 1931 and 1934, California, Centre for Chinese
Studies, University of California, 1973.
Lynch,
Michael, The Chinese Civil War 1945-49, Great
Britain, Osprey Publishing Ltd. 2010.
Puri S., Sukrit, Princeton Model United Nation Conference 2016: Chinese
Civil War, 2016.
[1] ‘Jiangxi Soviet’, Britannica
Concise Encyclopedia 2016, https://www.britanicca.com/topic/Jiangxi-Soviet
(accessed 3 April 2021)
[1] ‘Jiangxi Soviet’, Britannica Concise Encyclopedia 2016,
https://www.britanicca.com/topic/Jiangxi-Soviet
(accessed 3 April 2021)
[2] Patricia Ebrey and Anne Walthall, Modern East Asia: A cultural, Social, and Political History From 1600, Third Edition, Boston, Wadsworth, 2014 p. 442.
[3] Michael
Lynch, China:From empire to people’s republic 1900-49, Second Edition,
London, Hodder Education, 2010, p.72.
[4] Lynch, China:From empire to people’s republic 1900-49, p.73.
[5] Hans
J. Van de van, War and Nationalism in China, London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, p. 140.
[6] Derek
J. Waller, The Soviet Republic: Mao and the National
Congresses of 1931 and 1934, California, Centre for Chinese Studies,
University of California, 1973 p. 56.
[7] Michael
Lynch, The Chinese Civil War 1945-49, Great Britain, Osprey Publishing
Ltd., 2010, p. 16.
[8] Sukrit
S. Puri, Chinese Civil War PMUNC
2016, p. 13.
[9] Lynch, p. 75.
[10] Michael
Lynch, The Chinese Civil War 1945-49, p .17.
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