Chapter 29 Struggle (4)

Mao established political organizations in each company.Instead of setting up a political department as Shanghai instructed, it was to mobilize and organize a committee of ordinary soldiers to raise everyone's awareness by discussing political issues.To start a battle against the landowners' armed forces? The soldiers' committees would soon accuse the landowners of oppressing the peasants. Mao insisted on setting up a party group in each class, a party branch in each company, and a party committee in each battalion.In this way, the party is transformed from an abstract concept into a daily entity, bringing the party to the campfire at night and to the side of every soldier.

Officers are not allowed to beat and scold soldiers, and the accounts are made public and supervised by everyone.After every battle, Mao organized a democratic meeting, at which everyone could express their opinions, and they could also criticize or praise superior officers by name.After discussion, officers may also be demoted if consensus is reached.Mao became a teacher and moralist, and he created a new style of military affairs. The old Chinese army only knew how to use the bodies of soldiers, but never used their minds. It is about creating a democratic atmosphere where everyone feels part of the battle.However, this series of reforms made some old-fashioned military officers very angry with Mao.They are willing to fight for a future of democracy, but don't want to see democratic moves in the military they lead.

Mao also established discipline for the soldiers, a code of conduct among the masses.As early as when he was studying in Changsha, Mao had discovered that for Chinese soldiers, plundering the people around them seemed to have become a tradition. Robbery and rape are common things among soldiers.In Jinggangshan, however, weeks passed before the wary villagers learned that Mao had brought them peace and prosperity.Soldiers helped farmers sow in the spring, cut firewood for the elderly and infirm, returned the sickles they borrowed from farmers, paid for the vegetables they bought, and stayed in places where there were young girls without harassing them.It all turned upside down.

Mao is trying to prove that the army he leads is very different from the old army that the Chinese are familiar with, and he wants to establish a military-civilian fish-water relationship. Mao never attended a military school, where most of the other senior Red Army generals had studied*.His only military experience was to serve as an orderly for an officer of the Changsha garrison for six months.Like ordinary Chinese, he hated everything he saw in the military. -------------------------------- * For example, Zhou Enlai (Whampoa Military Academy), Lin Biao (Whampoa Military Academy), Peng Dehuai (Hunan Army Officer Lecture Hall), Zhu De (Yunnan Army Lecture Hall).Many years later, Mao said: "When I was fighting, I never read military books, and we never fought with books."[12]

Instead of being an ordinary soldier, he wants to become a military strategist directly.He believes that the army must have its own goals, and all actions of the army must obey this goal.As a military strategist, Mao was great, because he jumped out of the fetters of pure military affairs and put forward his own unique insights. Can we say that Mao was a democrat? The political system established by his new China had nothing to do with democracy.But on the road to power, he was a democrat because he believed that the decisive power lay among the people. He believes that everyone has their strengths, and generally speaking, all people are equal.Mao was very sensitive to such characteristics in others: not easy to adapt (as Mao was when he was studying at Dongshan School), uncompetitive (Mao's situation in Beijing in 1919-1920), unrestrained (he was like this almost all his life).He has extraordinary organizational skills, because he knows that only by fully listening to the opinions of the people can good results be achieved.

Mao needed Zhu's full cooperation, because he was caught between two forces at the time.Li Lisan in Shanghai believed that Mao was weak and incompetent, but the gentry in the Jinggangshan area were horrified to find that Mao was by no means incompetent, so they turned to the Kuomintang army for help to wipe out the "red bandits." At an important meeting held in Maoping, Mao put forward two viewpoints: [13] The first is to "concentrate our forces", and only when our army's combat effectiveness is superior to that of the enemy can we outflank and attack.Mao believed that the strength of the Red Army was still very weak at that time.

The second point of view is about work style, of course, not just work style.Mao saw politics and armed struggle as two sides of the same coin, inseparable. "Everyone can fight wars and do political work." Mao insisted on an armed Marxist movement, combining guns and books.This would allow the Red Army to take root in the vast countryside and then advance to the cities as the revolutionary upsurge came.The fact that the Party Central Committee remained in Shanghai fully demonstrates the fundamental conflict between the views of Mao and Li Lisan.Li Lisan's party was just a group of urban intellectuals, not a party capable of fighting at all.

At first, Mao did not want to occupy Jinggangshan for a long time.The establishment of this base area did not start with victory but with retreat. It was a new attempt after learning the lessons of failure.But Mao slowly discovered that red forces could survive in the mountains, although the Kuomintang still ruled much of China in Nanking. Mao concluded: "A base area is to the Red Army what a buttocks are to a man." Without the opportunity to sit down and rest, a man would surely collapse from fatigue. This was exactly the case with the Chinese Red Army in 1928. The Maoping route was still hanging in the air, and Mao could not fully put this theory into practice.For a whole summer he had to struggle with the Party Central Committee.Mao was so annoyed by the power leakers in Shanghai and Changsha that he jumped up and down with the "climax" like an enraged salmon.