Welcome to episode 119 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.

For the last two episodes, we’ve been talking about the line struggle between Mao Zedong and Zhu De, which was focused on questions of what it meant for the party to control the armed forces, and for the Fourth Red Army to engage in political work in addition to fighting the revolutionary war. Last episode, we ended with just a bit left in the close reading that we began in episode 117 of Mao’s June 14, 1929, letter to Lin Biao, so let’s just pick up where we left off and finish reading that letter, then I’ll have some comments about that last section of the letter, and we can move on to talk about what happened afterwards.

[MRP3 187-189]

So, the big question that this last part of the letter raises for me is, just how serious is Mao about requesting to leave the Front Committee. Now remember, this is a question that came up recently already in the letter from Zhou Enlai to Mao that we discussed in episode 114, where the Party Center ordered Mao and Zhu both to report to Shanghai, and as we saw in episode 115, Mao said that he was happy to do so as long as the Party Center sent someone along who could lead the army. Then, in episode 117, in the context of this fight over the army committee and all the criticism that Mao was being subjected to, following the June 8 meeting Mao actually wrote a letter of resignation.

Now, the question is, just how serious was Mao about resigning from the Front Committee. Was this a tactical move that Mao was making, which was supposed to bring his critics to their senses and make them realize that he was indispensable to the army, or did Mao really see himself as moving on from army work to doing something else? I think that it’s impossible to know for certain. On the one hand, this idea of Mao going to the USSR and getting some training there and then coming back to China makes a certain kind of sense. Certainly, Mao could see that lots of people who had accomplished less than he had were getting sent to Russia and then coming back with all kinds of political authority based on their time spent there, and he may well have momentarily felt that this was something that he wanted or needed. He had the example of Liu Angong right in front of him as a demonstration of how someone much less qualified than he was could be placed in authority above him based on having received training in Moscow.

And, on a kind of basic human level, it would be totally understandable that Mao would want or need a break after everything that he had been through since the Autumn Harvest Uprising. That really goes for everyone involved in the whole Jinggangshan experience and what followed it up to this point who remained alive.

On the other hand, Mao had poured so much of himself into making the Fourth Red Army what it was, and it was so central to his conception of how China would actualize its need for national liberation and humanity would actualize its need for communist revolution, that it’s very hard to think of Mao being serious about resigning from the Army. That is, unless Mao saw the writing on the wall that he was going to be forced out anyways and was maneuvering for being ousted from the army leadership to take place on the best possible terms for him to mount a political comeback.

First the demand from Zhou Enlai that he report to Shanghai for reassignment, and then the biting criticism from leading colleagues in the Fourth Red Army (including Zhu De) at the June 8th meeting, may have convinced Mao that his position as leader of the Front Committee might become untenable soon, and it would be better to resign than to get kicked out.

So, those are most of my thoughts on Mao’s resignation offer. There is a bit more that I want to say regarding this, based in part on some differences in how historians have understood the sources surrounding this line struggle and how it played out, but I’ll get to that in just a few minutes here. First, let’s look at what happened next as the line struggle played out.

The next major episode of this line struggle took place on June 22, at the 7th Party Congress of the 4th Red Army. In anticipation of this congress, Mao proposed to the front committee that the congress take the approach of seeking unity through discussing and summing up past struggles. The rest of the Front Committee rejected this proposal, however. Mao had taken this approach in his letter to Lin Biao, so Mao’s opponents had already had a chance to read Mao’s lengthy summation of that history and the conclusions that Mao drew from this history. It is doubtful that anyone else on the Front Committee had such a consolidated and coherent view of the events of the past year and the ideological implications of those events, and it’s not surprising that Mao’s opponents did not want to provide Mao such favorable conditions for the fight that would take place during the Congress.

As it turned out, the 7th Congress (remember, this is a congress of just of the party members who were working in the 4th Red Army, not an overall party congress like the one that took place in Moscow that we discussed in episodes 101 to 106)… So, as it turned out, at the 7th Congress there was a lot of discussion of the events that had happened since the base area had been set up in the Jinggangshan, and of the whole experience there and subsequent to the retreat from the Jinggangshan. And, on many particular points, Mao carried the day. However, just like how at the June 8 meeting Mao won on the point of abolishing the Army Committee but then was criticized so much that he felt that he had to offer to resign from the Front Committee, at this June 22 Congress while Mao prevailed on some important particular points, he was again subjected to heavy criticism, and he lost on his overall point regarding party control of the army.

The Congress adopted a resolution stating that “It does not square with facts to state that there is a struggle between a mindset of roving rebel bands and an opposing ideology.” The resolution also described the principle of centralized leadership as a “tendency that would lead to a patriarchal system.” Mao was given a serious disciplinary warning and was held as the main person responsible for the dispute, although Zhu De, Lin Biao, and Liu Angong were all also criticized. These disciplinary warnings were, I suppose, the Communist Party equivalent of having something bad placed in your permanent record. At the end of the Congress, Mao was re-elected to serve on the 13-person Front Committee but was removed from the secretaryship of the Committee. He did not follow through on his threat to resign from the committee altogether.

Chen Yi was appointed in Mao’s place as secretary of the Front Committee, and Mao was assigned to be the Front Committee’s special representative to the Western Fujian Special Committee, with the task of helping to guide the work of setting up the new Western Fujian base area.

After being replaced, Mao made a final speech at the Congress:

Mao bio 215

In early July Mao arrived in Jiaoyang, where the Western Fujian Special Committee was preparing to hold the First Party Congress of Western Fujian. When Mao got there, he decided that not enough social investigation had been done in order to hold to congress, and so he delayed the congress for a week while going out with the various party representatives to the Congress back to their native areas and guiding them in how to conduct social investigations as the basis for then later at the Congress formulating policies for carrying out land reform, organizing local militias, and other forms of party work based on the concrete conditions of the particular local areas.

The Congress was held from July 20 to 29, and in the wake of the Congress a land reform was carried out as part of organizing and consolidating the new Communist base area in western Fujian. This was actually an operation on a pretty massive scale. The land reform was carried out in over 600 townships, with more than 800,000 poor peasants receiving land through the redistribution that the party organized. Just for a sense of scale, it’s interesting (to me at least) to compare this number to some of the numbers of people involved in more recent revolutionary experiences. For example, the entire province of Ayacucho, where the Peruvian Communists had their initial mass base during that country’s civil war, has a population of not much over 600,000. (And the portion of Ayacucho that the Shining Path controlled encompassed only a small fraction of that population, although they worked politically and had a large impact far beyond the area that they controlled outright.) And in Nepal, the revolutionary areas of Rukum and Rolpa from the people’s war there had a combined population of a bit over 400,000. I suppose that it’s not really much of a revelation for me to note that China is big and has a lot of people, but it I do find the sheer number of people affected by the land reform to be really large, especially since a few months earlier there had been very limited Communist activity in the area, before the Fourth Red Army came through in the Spring (as we discussed in episode 116). Mao didn’t make his famous statement that “Without a People's army, the people have nothing” until 1945, but I think that you can really see what he meant when you look at the rapidity of this transformation in western Fujian in 1929.

At the end of the Western Fujian Congress, the Front Committee held an emergency meeting where a decision was made to send Chen Yi to Shanghai to discuss with the Central Committee the decisions that had been taken at the June 22 Congress along with Mao’s June 14 letter to Lin Biao. After all, in the exchange of letters between Mao and Zhou Enlai that we discussed in episodes 114 and 115, both Mao and Zhou had agreed that a “capable comrade” should go to Shanghai and consult with the Central Committee even if Mao or Zhu De couldn’t go themselves, and so now that the Fourth Red Army needed some help resolving this dispute, it seemed like a good idea to send someone to Shanghai and get some help from the Central Committee in resolving the issue.

Towards the end of the Western Fujian Congress, Mao had begun to come down with malaria (which means that he was definitely sick already during the Front Committee meeting held at the end of the Congress). Now, this coincidence that Mao got malaria not long after being sidelined from the top leadership position in the Fourth Red Army has played a role in some discrepancies in how the history of this line struggle over Party leadership over the army has been written about, and so I want to address that here.

So, there is a major tendency in the historical literature for historians to write as if Mao had gotten sick back in June around the time of the June 22 Congress, or, even, as if he had “gotten sick,” that is, that he ‘called in sick’ and stopped working because he was upset about being taken out of leadership. However, the most authoritative and detailed Chinese sources which track Mao’s day-to-day movements (to the best that can be done according to the historical record), as well as some recollections from the time by people who were there, all have Mao getting sick at the end of the Western Fujian Congress toward the end of July, not a month earlier when he was removed from the secretaryship of the Front Committee.

I want to speak to why so many historians make this mistake in discussing Mao’s malaria sickness in relationship to this political struggle. And I think there are some understandable and some less understandable reasons for this. First of all, when you look at Mao’s own words in his letter to Lin Biao, which we read earlier in this episode, where he says that he is “too weak physically and too poor in his wisdom and knowledge, so I hope that the Central Committee can send me to Moscow to study and rest for a while.” Some people have read this as Mao saying that he was already sick with the malaria and needed a rest. While Mao may well have wanted to go to Moscow (although even this isn’t certain), I think that this passage was false modesty, and that when this passage is read in the context of understanding Mao’s self-confidence and his also his generally hearty physical health, that it’s hard to avoid any other conclusion. But, because he does get sick so soon after writing this, I think that throws some people off.

Additionally, Mao getting sick at the end of the Western Fujian Congress instead of at the end of the Fourth Army Congress may have thrown off some historians who were moving quickly through the details. Much of the literature on this period doesn’t even mention the Western Fujian Congress, and it’s entirely possible that some people writing about this period came upon some memoir or document noting Mao getting sick at the end of a Congress and mistakenly thinking that this referred to the June 22 Congress.

Finally, pretty much all historians are most concerned about the main argument that they are trying to make, and sometimes details which are minor in relationship to the larger point that the author is trying to make can slip by, because they just aren’t that important in relationship to what the author is trying to accomplish with the book. This can be frustrating when you pick up someone’s book and you don’t care about the particular hobby horse they are writing, or, as with so many academic books, whatever idee fixe they are compulsively picking at, and rather just want to use the book to glean whatever you can for your own research (that is, for your own, different and obviously much more reasonable compulsive fixation).

But fortunately, there are also some sources from China whose main mission (or one of whose main missions) is to establish a definitive record of what Mao was doing and when. The most important of these is a thick, three volume work called the Mao Zedong Nianpu (or Mao Zedong Chronicle), which tracks what Mao was doing on a day by day basis to the best that can be documented. And on top of this, there is the biography written by a team led by Jin Chongji. These books draw on records that are not available to researchers outside the Chinese Communist Party historians group, and also benefit from the fact that a whole team of people worked to meticulously track what Mao was doing and when. For this reason alone, I would find these books more authoritative for issues having to do with what Mao was doing, when, and where.

But this is amplified both by observations made by people who were present at the time of the Front Committee meetings and Congresses that we have been referencing, and by some other errors in the works that claim that Mao got sick in June and not July. For an example from people who were present at the time, there is Jiang Hua, who was secretary general of the political department of the Fourth Red Army and who delivered Lin Biao’s June 8 letter to Mao, who totally rejects that idea that Mao was sick at the time that he was deposed from the leadership position and that Mao would have willingly given up being secretary of the Front Committee.

And on the other hand, some of the books that claim that Mao got sick in June have citation errors that make it hard to trust their judgment. For example, in this book Forging Leninism in China, some of the footnotes from this period refer to parts of the Nianpu that deal with an earlier period, so the references don’t actually match, much less substantiate, what is being discussed. And in addition, the author, a well-established Harvard professor, refers to Mao’s June 14th letter to Lin Biao as the letter that Mao’s famous work “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire” was excerpted from, when in fact it was Mao’s January 5, 1930 letter to Lin Biao that it was taken from. Anyways, neither of these errors affect the author, Joseph Fewsmith’s, overall argument, and honestly, anyone can make errors like these. But, I will say that when I find a discrepancy in the literature, I am much more likely to think that the author not making these kinds of errors is more likely to be right when it comes to figuring out details, like when exactly Mao got malaria.

Anyways, the issue of when and under what conditions Mao got sick, and indeed, the fact that he did get sick and wasn’t faking it, impact how we understand Mao’s reaction to, at least for a time, losing out in this line struggle with Zhu De and getting kicked out of the leading position in the red army. Was he a petulant loser who took his ball and went home when he didn’t get his way, or was he a principled revolutionary leader who persevered despite losing in a particular inner party political struggle?

And, rather than just tell you what happened, I felt the need to bring up this problem in the historiography because if you do go and read about this period on your own, you’re likely to run into an inaccurate retelling of these events. Even in Chen Jian’s (a very prominent historian of China whose work I have learned so much from), even in his recently published biography of Zhou Enlai, he recounts these events in the following words: “Mao flew into a wild rage. Alone, he departed for ‘medical treatment’ while he filed a complaint to the Party Center.” You see, this is what happens when you rely on bad sources. Here we have what is currently considered the definitive biography of Zhou Enlai in the English language, and it reproduces this nonsense about Mao storming off in a rage, rather than going and carrying out a land reform that benefitted over 800,000 poor peasants. I often wonder how people who write like this think that Mao actually carried off and won a 22-year-long war if he was such a petulant hot head.