Chapter 27 Struggle (1927-1935) (2)

Mao proposed that the Communist Party of China must establish a regular army in the countryside.For a considerable period of time, the party should indeed become an army.Only when a firm foothold is established in the countryside and complete control of this large area can the cities be occupied and the revolution finally completed. This is not Marxism as understood in Europe or Shanghai.It later became Maoism accepted by China and spread to Africa and Latin America. Mao started his real revolutionary action at the same time as he grabbed the barrel of the gun. In the early 1920s, he was busy with organizational work in Guangdong and Shanghai, and he paid little attention to or wrote articles on military issues.He was a revolutionary, but he never killed anyone with a gun.

From 1925, Mao turned to work in the countryside, but he was not immediately interested in the military.He also did not analyze military power in the "Investigation Report on the Hunan Peasant Movement". Since the split between the KMT and the CCP in mid-1927, Mao took up a gun, and all his Communist colleagues also held guns (after Professor Chen Duxiu returned to his study in Shanghai).But the goal at that time was to occupy the city, and a few people were thrown together in a hurry, which could not be called a regular army at all. Jinggangshan was not just a place of refuge, Mao established a brand new armed force here.

Urban roads are dead in both senses.Mao began living with the peasants, and he did not return to the city until twenty years later.At that time, the main task was violent resistance, and Mao became a commander.He said frankly: "The struggle on the border is completely a military struggle, and the party and the masses have to militarize together."③ What a paradox that the May 4th movement reaped its first real political fruit in Jinggang Mountains! The 1919 movement was started in the city by students who opposed Confucianism and chanted the downfall of imperialism. slogan.And what does this have to do with guns and rice fields?

This is the battle of heroes.If Mao's tenure in a bloated bureaucracy from 1923 to 1926 failed Professor Yang's Promethean assessment of him, Mao's struggle at Jinggangshan in 1928 made him truly Became a Prometheus figure.Mao knew: "Conscious initiative is a characteristic of human beings. Human beings strongly display such characteristics in war."④ In terms of ideology, the students during the May Fourth Movement were heroes of steel.What they held in their hands during the demonstration was not a gun but a brush.They are just vehement words.Mao's real creativity lay in his combination of three things: guns, peasant arming, and Marxism.Mao cannot be called a pioneer in any respect, but he was the first person to combine the three.

Mao did not seem like a soldier.He does not strut with pomp, nor do he pay attention to appearance or discipline in the usual military sense.It might look more coordinated if he's carrying a book instead of a gun. Mao used the barrel of a gun to express a humanitarian worldview.Until his death, he firmly believed that in war, the human element is more important than weapons.The reason is very simple, war is a means of politics, to get the support of the people, and both are absolutely indispensable. In Jinggangshan, Mao made his famous metaphor, that is, he compared the army to "fish" and the common people to "water".In China, knights are always regarded as people with a sense of justice. The green forest heroes in "Water Margin" did not completely replace moral disputes with violent fights, that is, they did not fight and talk while fighting as recognized in Western war theories, but launched moral struggles during the war. They often fought with the enemy. Start a debate! The same is true for Mao. During his more than 50 years of political career, he never gave up fierce debates with his enemies.

During the May Fourth Movement, Mao was attracted by two roads leading to a new China, and they were respectively believed by two professors he admired.A path is called a "process".Chen Duxiu believed in the laws of historical development proposed by Marx and Lenin; feudal society, capitalist society, socialist society, and communist society. In the process of seeking Marxism, what Chen Duxiu grasped was indeed the science of social change.Cities are the locus of this change, and workers are key to it.The contradictions of capitalism are increasing day by day, and revolution will be its inevitable result.

The second way emphasizes the power of "will".Li Dazhao gave Marxism a new interpretation of morality and impulsivity.No matter how even the ratio of the two is, it is the Chinese who built socialism in China, and the majority of the Chinese population are peasants. Only when the rural areas have completed their own transformation can the new China come. As a Marxist, Mao believed in the "process" theory in the early days, trade unions, cities, and the October Revolution.He stood like a scribe at the gate of history, waiting for the "climax" of the revolution to arrive.He spends a lot of time organizing this.This was the period when Professor Chen's thought was dominant.

But when we arrived at Jinggangshan, it was another story. In the winter of 1927-1928, in the struggle to create a new political system, the sculptor worked largely alone with the clay.Action replaces passive waiting. Li Dazhao wrote to intellectuals as early as 1919: "We should go to the fields to work, so that the cultural atmosphere can be united with the shadows of trees and smoke in the villages in the mountains..."⑤ In the scattered villages in Jinggangshan, there are no more than 2,000 residents in total. The soil in the area is very barren, and there are exposed stones everywhere.Peasants don't have matches, so they have to strike stones to make fire like primitive people.

"Old cousin, what's your name?" ⑥ Mao always asked this when he encountered timid or wary peasants.It is wise for him to be so polite and cautious.Compared with politics in the city, politics on Jinggangshan is more difficult and complicated. There are also secret societies here.There are fierce conflicts between the local people and the Hakka people who immigrated from the north.The local gentry colluded with the warlords at the foot of the mountain and the Kuomintang.Mao is a true outsider. Like a craftsman, Mao had to tread carefully.He cannot carry out land reform with great fanfare, because there is too little land.He was caught between the landlord and the bandit, and the landlord and the bandit almost went hand in hand.Squeezed by the landlords, the peasants had no choice but to go to the mountains to become bandits.The class structure here is not mentioned in the documents of the Chinese Communist Party or in Mao's previous articles.

Mao adopted a witty and flexible strategy in this challenge, just like a "monkey" coming out of the mountain.The CCP's "wife" proletariat is far away in the city. In this case, the bandits became Mao's political "mistresses".