Mao and the Renewal of the CCP (Jiangxi Period)

Despite the purge at Shanghai, the CCP was by no means done for. It was a party whose idea had been seeded in various places and (though thousands had been killed) there still remained tens of thousands of adherents. Members had received their first baptism of fire. For the time being the GMD had a significant power base superiority, though (in the major cities, especially, and those cities were where, in the traditional party and Communist doctrine, the party had to operate).

The countryside (where the CCP was able to gain the most actual traction) was a sideshow for conventional Communists but a faction led by Mao disagreed. The mountainous countryside happened to be safer for the moment than the cities and sooner or later, after failed uprisings, more and more members were forced to retreat to Mao’s rural patch in the province of Jiangxi. It eventually became a prime Communist base. Mao had begun to become an ideologist in contradicting the orthodoxy presumed by many of his senior fellows and developed his own rural class analysis. He stressed the importance of land and social reform policies, saw the poor peasants as a revolutionary class – a kind of rural proletariat – and acted at Jiangxi, setting up a new kind of reforming state, the Jiangxi Soviet, to implement land reform there.

The province was poor and inequality in it was endemic so it was ripe for popular support for Communism and long-overdue reform. While Mao still didn’t lead the party, he began to make his reputation here as at least an uncompromising fighter for the party and a firebrand who could shout slogans with the best of them. As unaware as most Chinese intellectuals of China’s ubiquitous rural poverty, meanwhile, Western producers of newsreels on China in the 1920s and even the 1930s typically depicted things like the undoubtedly effervescent debauchery and heady decadence they were able to find in the relatively cosmopolitan sectors of cities like Shanghai.

In tactical terms, Mao also organised forces to conduct the guerrilla warfare he favoured from his base. When the GMD set its sights on Jiangxi in a series of ‘extermination’ campaigns, on four occasions Mao’s forces successfully defended themselves and the Soviet using these tactics. Chiang’s forces moved too quickly, ironically, to be able to coordinate the advance so as to effectively engage Mao’s more manoeuvrable guerrilla force. By the fifth occasion, however, Chiang had learned this lesson. His forces advanced more slowly and methodically this time and were thus able to strangle the CCP forces.

Mao was down and out (for the time being). While the CCP lived to fight another day, Mao lost command of his forces and a Soviet advisor, Li De (formerly Otto Braun), was brought in, who advised the Communist Red Army (later the People’s Liberation Army – PLA) to fight with more orthodoxy. As the GMD had air superiority, however, and other advantages in a conventional war, this advice proved to be the wrong advice and the Communists were violently defeated and forced into the retreat that came to be called the Long March. In part, this military defeat also occurred because the party was losing support. Aspects of the violent intentions and policies of the party that were off-putting to many had become clearer to more former supporters.