Chapter 34 Struggle (9)

The only conclusion Mao drew from his failure to march into Nanchang was that Li Lisan's line was completely bankrupt. * ---------------------------------- * When leaving the border of Fujian and Jiangxi to attack Nanchang, Mao must have doubts about this expedition.When he left Changting, he wrote in a poem: Millions of workers and peasants are excited, Sweeping across Jiangxi and hitting Hunan and Hubei. An international elegy, Hurricane fell from the sky for me. There is no million, and it is hard to call it Hurricane. In addition, can a foreign song really make Mao feel a lot of emotion?

However, the smoke of failure has not yet cleared, and Li played another trick.A month after the defeat at Changsha, Li told Peng Dehuai to try again and ordered Zhu and Mao to join the battle as well.The Red Army has more than 20,000 people and is the most powerful army of the Chinese Communist Party so far.Mao led the team to attack for twelve days, but the Kuomintang army had planes, artillery and warships.... Mao gave up the fight and disobeyed Li's orders (with Peng and Zhu).He opposed Li with practical actions and returned to Gannan. Li Lisan collapsed.Within two months, he lost all positions in the party.Like his predecessor, Qu Qiubai, he was summoned to Moscow, where he was scolded, punished, and then imprisoned.

As a result of the attack on Changsha, Kaihui and Mao's step-sister were killed.His two sons were rescued, but Mao did not see them until many years later.His family's land was seized by the Kuomintang, and what's more, they also dug up his parents' graves. Mao could no longer receive land rent, and this "red squire" no longer had a good place to retreat.Mao confiscated the property of many landlords in Jinggangshan and Jiangxi, and only now did he know what it was like to be confiscated. It is incomprehensible that Mao appreciated his fame in Shaoshan.Later he said to Edgar Snow about his image in Shaoshan: "The local peasants believed that I would soon return to my hometown." He was referring to the early 1930s.It seems a little smug.

Mao went on to say: "One day, a plane flew over the sky, and they concluded that it was me who was sitting on the plane. They warned the people who planted my field at that time, saying that I had come back to inspect my field. No trees were cut down. They said that if they were cut down, I would definitely demand compensation from Chiang Kai-shek.” Mao always felt that the reliable rural world had an invisible attraction for him. Li Lisan's main critics were not those who were persecuted by him, but a group of newcomers who had just returned from studying in the Soviet Union, and they clung to him.Mao had seen his future clearly, and he had other things to do, and he wanted to fight against a group of new opponents-28 Bolsheviks.

The "28 Bolsheviks" were a group of leftist Chinese students studying in Moscow who were appreciated by Stalin because they stood against Trotsky.They studied at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow under the tutor of the rector Victor Pavel Miff.Miff was also an effective adviser to Stalin's Far East policy, so he soon came from the university campus to the alleys of Shanghai, becoming Borodin in the early 1930s. Twenty-eight Bolsheviks know nothing but theory.Indeed, they were all inexperienced, and two of the best, Wang Ming and Bo Gu, were both 24 years old when they replaced Li Lisan at the party center in 1931.

The two of them had little in common with Mao except that they were both Chinese. Wang Ming came from a landlord family and had a gentle temperament.Bogu's father was a county magistrate in the Qing Dynasty.Both had been top students at Shanghai University, and both had left China to study in the Soviet Union as teenagers (Mao had not left Hunan in his teens). They left Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow to return to China in 1930.Unexpectedly, at the Central Committee meeting held in Shanghai in early 1931, the two of them actually won the highest leadership of the Communist Party of China.Miff played a big part in this.

As if to welcome Wang and Bo's return to China, Mao wrote an article entitled "Against Bookletism".The topic of the article was to discuss the difference between "Marxism in the valley" and the Marxism learned in Moscow. Mao's slogan was: "Without investigation, there is no right to speak." This period was Mao's best life since 1926.Li Lisan had been purged, and the central government began to have a good impression of rural work, even though the party central committee was far away in the French Concession in Shanghai at that time.Mao was elected to the Politburo in September 1930 (the first time since 1927).

Work in the Jiangxi base area with Mao as the political leader progressed smoothly. By the end of 1930, the area of ​​the base area had expanded to 19,000 square miles, with a population of 3 million under its jurisdiction.The fiasco of several attacks on the cities further enhanced the prestige of Jiangxi and other red rural bases. Li Lisan's "joke" became a reality.Many senior party officials came to the mountains, and the party central committee decided to establish a "Soviet regime" as the provisional government of China, which made the emphasis on rural base areas concrete.In the political atmosphere after Li Lisan, Mao inevitably became an important political figure in the CCP.

After three years of fighting Li Lisan, Mao now had to grapple with a thorny legacy of that struggle.Li Lisan's followers in Jiangxi disliked Mao and his ideas and plotted a rebellion.Some of them were members of the infiltrated AB regiment (Anti-Bolshevik, "anti-Bolshevik regiment").The purpose of the KMT's establishment of the AB group is to infiltrate the Chinese Communist Party. After Mao was alerted, he acted quickly and imprisoned several leading figures who opposed him in Tomita.This action brought the rebellion to a climax, and thousands of people rushed to Tomita in an attempt to release the prisoners.Thousands of armed fighters took part in the weeks-long battle.This was the first major event in the Communist camp.

Mao won, but he did not become magnanimous because of his victory.He violated the internal struggle policy of "curing the disease and saving the patient" that he had formulated, and he killed hundreds or even thousands of people.If this incident made Mao no longer as popular as before, it made his ruling position more consolidated. * --------------------------- * The AB regiment was not an anti-Bolshevik regiment. The Tomita Incident had a special environment, and Mao did make mistakes in its handling. ——Correction Note