Welcome to episode 120 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.

Last episode, we discussed Mao being sent by the Front Committee to work in western Fujian, and at the end of the episode Mao had just come down with malaria, while Chen Yi went off to Shanghai to discuss the line struggle going on in the Fourth Red Army’s party leadership with the Central Committee.

After that final July 29 Front Committee meeting which came right after the end of the Western Fujian party congress, Mao went into an extended convalescence to recover from his malaria. During this time, he was moved around a bit, which may have in part had to do with keeping him secure while the Communists fought off a suppression campaign launched by the Guomindang against the western Fujian soviet. Mao was able to read reports and newspapers and give some guidance during the less intense moments of his sickness, but mostly he was suffering through the disease and trying to get over it.

After the front committee meeting, Chen Yi made his way to Xiamen, then by boat to Hong Kong, and on another boat from Hong Kong to Shanghai. Just to refresh your memory about what was going on with the Party Center in Shanghai, we talked in episode 114 about how, although the general secretary was Xiang Zhongfa, Xiang was not really an effective leader, and in fact Zhou Enlai and another leading Communist, Li Lisan, were in a contest with each other for practical leadership of the party throughout 1929 and up until April 1930. And when Chen Yi got to Shanghai, Zhou Enlai and Li Lisan were delegated to work out the problems in the Red Army with Chen.

Chen Yi wrote a series of reports on the situation in the Fourth Red Army, and Zhou Enlai in particular held a series of discussions with Chen Yi about his reports. While the discussions covered a range of issues that had come up for the Red Army, of particular importance was the issue that had most divided Mao and Zhu De, the issue of how much control the party should exercise over the army.

Chen Yi raised the issue of the relationship between political commissars and military commanders like this: “Political workers and military officers frequently have disputes, just as in the old days in the National Revolutionary Army.” Here Chen is referring to the whole experience of the National Revolutionary Army from back before and during the Northern Expedition, when the Communists played a key role in politicizing the army. You might remember episodes 30 and 31 where we spoke about Zhou Enlai’s role in introducing the political commissar system into the National Revolutionary Army.

Chen continued that there were four ways in which political workers and military officers could interact: “(1) a political worker can be equal to a military officer (just like a husband and wife), with the result that they argue every day; (2) the political worker’s authority can be restricted to just political training, but in this way the military officer’s authority is too great, and the political worker becomes like a concubine; (3) as in the Jiangxi Red Army’s Second Regiment [that’s a reference to the troops in the Donggu base area, which you might remember Mao was really impressed with the political control that the party had over the army there], the military officer must take orders from the political worker, and in this way it becomes a father–son type of relation; or (4) the military officer and the political worker are equal, but the party secretary always dominates and all work is accountable to the party branch.”

The Politburo met on August 29 to discuss the situation in the Fourth Red Army and decided that Mao should be reappointed as secretary of the Front Committee. Despite the fact that politburo members seem to have agreed that Mao might have been a bit heavy-handed in his leadership style, they were much more concerned about the turn toward extreme democracy that the June 22 Red Army Party Congress had taken. You might recall from last episode that the Congress had adopted a resolution which described the principle of centralized leadership as a “tendency that would lead to a patriarchal system.” As you can imagine, the Central Committee itself did not take particularly kindly to that opinion.

The politburo also decided to recall Liu Angong. Clearly, from their perspective, he had completely bungled his job as being a representative of the Central Committee within the Red Army leadership. Basically, this guy whose whole job was to reassert greater Central Committee control over Mao Zedong and Zhu De, had arrived in the army and immediately played a role as a catalyst in bringing to a head the long-simmering dispute between Mao and Zhu over party control of the army. Then, Liu used his position to assist in resolving that dispute in a way that undermined centralized authority in Communist organizations on principle. In essence, this was the exact opposite of what he had been sent to do. As it turned out, before he could make it back to Shanghai, Liu Angong ended up dying in battle on October 21, while leading a column of troops in difficult fighting as the Red Army expanded its conquest of western Fujian.

Anyways, after the Politburo meeting of August 29, Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi worked on a letter, which was finally completed on September 28 and which is colloquially known as the “September Instruction,” but which is officially the “Directive from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party to the Front Committee of the Fourth Army of the Red Army,” which is the title that you will find an edited version of the letter listed under in Zhou Enlai’s Selected Works. The letter has eight sections in the version published in Zhou’s Selected Works, although there is a ninth and final section dealing with relations between Mao and Zhu De. This section has never been made public, but it apparently criticized both Mao and Zhu even-handedly and called for them to patch things up. You might recall from episode 80 that Zhu De went directly from the train station to Zhou Enlai’s apartment in Berlin in 1922 to tell Zhou his story and to join the Communist Party, so Zhou Enlai is another person who had a long-standing personal tie with Zhu De from his time in Europe, and this may have had something to do with easing Zhu De’s path back to patching things up with Mao and accepting Mao’s return to the leadership of the Front Committee.

The whole letter is worth reading if you are looking to immerse yourself in this moment in the life of the Chinese Communist Party. I’ve included a link to Zhou’s Selected Works in the show notes. To give you a sense of the most relevant things that were said in the letter regarding the political struggle between Zhu and Mao over the party’s political control of the army and the political role that army soldiers should (or should not) be playing, I’ll just read you a couple of the most relevant paragraphs.

This first paragraph that I’ll read is bullet pointed as “The problem of centralization.”

Zhou 54

Here, Zhou is pretty clearly coming down on the side of reasserting the authority of the Front Committee as the centralized leadership of the army, and this reinforces a point made just a little earlier in the letter under the bullet point “Democracy in the army.”

Zhou 52

The letter also clarifies the Central Committee position on the political use of red army soldiers in a section titled “The Red Army and the Masses.” To give you a sense of the thrust of what is argued there, I’ll read the first paragraph of that section for you:

Zhou 48

As you can see, this letter came down pretty heavily on the side of Mao Zedong. But, in Zhou Enlai’s classic diplomatic fashion, there is an important nod to some of Zhu De’s criticisms in a paragraph bullet-pointed as “Arguments over organizational matters.”

Zhou 54-55

As you can see, there is an implicit acknowledgement here of some of Zhu De’s criticisms that Mao Zedong was taking personal responsibility for directing too many things, for trying to micro-manage the Red Army to some degree. Although clearly, the overall thrust of the letter is to criticize the tendency toward what the Central Committee called “ultra-democracy” and to affirm Mao’s stance on the importance of party control over the Red Army and Red Army involvement in a variety of Communist political activities.

Meanwhile, the Fourth Red Army held its 8th Party Congress in late September, directly following the capture of the Shanghang county seat western Fujian. As if to illustrate the point that Zhou Enlai was making about ‘ultra-democracy’ in the September Instruction (which would not yet have arrived in Fujian), the Congress got bogged down in endless discussions of minutiae. As one participant wrote in a report: “Because of the practice of a ‘democratic system from bottom to top,’ each meeting was locked in an endless debate.” No preparations had been made for the meeting, and each question, big or small, was debated, and often no conclusion was reached. The report continued “on the question of the Party representative’s authority over the Red Army’s laws and regulations, no solution was found after two days of discussions. Finally, it was decided to ask for instructions from the Central Committee… The Eighth Party Congress of the 4th Red Army was bogged down in a disorganized state for three days without any result… This was a tendency towards ultra-democracy at various levels of leading bodies…”

The Front Committee had sent word beforehand, asking Mao to attend the Congress. Mao wrote back that:

“All my life I have been carrying out meticulous investigations and exercising close supervision over work. This is a thorn in the flesh of Chen Yi’s doctrine. Chen Yi wants me to curry favor in all directions, but that is something I cannot do; I cannot return casually before the right and wrong are distinguished in the Party of the 4th Red Army. What’s more, I’m not in good health. Therefore, I’ll not attend the Congress.”

As we can see, Mao emphasized his political objections more than his illness, and directed his ire at Chen Yi, who would have still been in Shanghai, as the chair of the Front Committee.

The Front Committee responded by issuing Mao an internal ‘warning’ (another mark on his permanent record) and ordered that he attend the Congress. Mao had to be carried to Shanghang on a stretcher, and arrived only after the Congress was over. When the Front Committee members saw how sick Mao actually was, he was left alone to continue recovering.

As it turned out, Mao got lucky in being forced to go to Shanghang, because there was a famous doctor there, and after ten days of treatment by this guy, Mao started noticeably improving. By late October Mao was able to rejoin the work of the western Fujian special committee.

Meanwhile, Chen Yi returned to western Fujian from Shanghai, meeting with Zhu De on October 22 and convening a Front Committee meeting to build consensus on November 18. This meeting accepted the Central Committee’s decision and formally asked Mao to come back and resume his position as secretary of the Front Committee.

In late November, when Mao got the letter from Chen Yi asking him to take up the secretaryship again, he returned to Changting with the troops who had been sent with the letter, and Mao, Zhu, and Chen Yi held a reconciliation meeting. At this meeting, everyone indicated their acceptance of the September Instruction. Mao accepted the criticism of his micro-management style of work. And Chen Yi indicated that he had learned a lot during his two months in Shanghai (later he would refer to this time as a period of tremendous political education for him, essentially a political training course), and criticized his former positions. Mao said that when he wrote and criticized Chen Yi when he initially refused to go the 8th Party Congress that he had not been in good spirits because of his bad health and had written some disheartening words because of that. And so, things were patched up between Mao, Zhu, and Chen.

Meanwhile, Guomindang agents had gotten word of Mao’s illness and begun spreading rumors that he had died from tuberculosis. These rumors spread far and wide, and in fact got picked up by the Comintern, which ran an obituary for Mao early in 1930. It’s another sign of the difficulties in communication between Moscow and the Chinese Communist Party that these Guomindang rumors, which ran in Chinese newspapers, got picked up by the Comintern. The obituary ran like this:

Bio 217

The obituary served as proof the regard that the Comintern had for Mao, and this palpable expression of Moscow’s regard for Mao would serve as something of a shield for Mao in some of the inner-party political fights that are coming up. Interestingly, this obituary has been misinterpreted in some of the historical literature as a sign of murderous intent against Mao on the part of his opponents in the Chinese party and in Moscow. But in fact it was just the Comintern picking up on Guomindang rumors that made it into the news, and their failure (or inability) to confirm the news with the Chinese Party before running the obituary, which, as I said, was an indication of regard for Mao, not desire for his death.