Chapter 4 Chapter 3 Warlords and Bolsheviks

During Deng Xiaoping’s five-year stay in France from 1926 to 1927, great changes took place in China’s political situation. The number of warlord-controlled territories continued to increase, almost extending to the entire country except remote areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang. The number of large and small warlords Rapidly growing into the hundreds.The appearance and personality of each warlord are very different, but they have two common characteristics, that is, they all command an army that is completely loyal to themselves and have their own territory.The larger warlords were divided into three alliances or factions, and they used intrigue, sometimes by force, to gain more territory or dominate the Beiyang government.The Beiyang government did not actually govern any land, but it possessed qualifications that even the largest warlord did not possess: political legitimacy as stipulated in the Provisional Constitution of the Republic in 1912, recognition by foreign governments, and Functions: the right to borrow domestically and abroad.Therefore, for warlords, if they can control the president and prime minister, it is the greatest political capital.

At the same time, a new revolutionary movement was quietly emerging, set against the backdrop of anger over the failure of the revolution of 1911-12 and its aftermath: Yuan Shikai proclaimed emperor, warlords divided the country, and the country was divided.Another reason was public outrage at the continued privileges enjoyed by foreign powers in China.At that time, the world powers continued to carve up China, causing China to be humiliated repeatedly, and even turned into transferring all the rights of Germany in the Shandong Peninsula to Japan at the Versailles Conference. The third reason is that the new generation of intellectuals believed that in order to realize In order to modernize and gain the right to control the destiny of the country, China must go through a cultural revolution and a social revolution, and there is no other choice.The ideology and goals of the new revolutionary movement are more radical than those of the past. Its formal ideology is still composed of the Three People's Principles first proposed by Sun Yat-sen in 1905, that is, nationality, civil rights, and people's livelihood, but it has also made a clearer definition of it. Anti-imperialist and collectivist explanations.The unanimous goal of the revolutionary movement was to eliminate the warlords, establish a strong republican government, and abolish the various privileges enjoyed by foreigners in Chinese territory.

The new revolutionary movement also differs from the past in its composition and organizational form.Previous revolutionary movements included some who called themselves Marxists and some anarchists.The new movement includes the Communist Party of China. The Communist Party of China was an abandoned house in a girls' school in Shanghai in 1921 (there is an error here. The venue for the "First Congress" of the Communist Party of China was No. 3 Shudeli, Wangzhi Road, French Concession, Shanghai, and Li Hanjun's It was formed at a meeting held in the house, attended by representatives of six Marxist groups from all over the country.In 1922 and 1923, the CCP was very small, only a few hundred people, but it had begun to call itself "a militant and disciplined proletarian party" and had regular Leninist organizations and branches.More importantly, this organization and the movement it led as a whole had become a branch of the Moscow Comintern, so it had to submit reports to it and receive instructions from the organization.The KMT, another larger party involved in the movement, also leaned toward Moscow and consulted the Soviet Union on political and organizational issues.In the autumn of 1923, Mikhail Borodin, a Bolshevik member with extensive experience in foreign work, arrived in Guangzhou, revised the program for the Kuomintang along the Leninist line and reorganized the party.Thus, from 1924 onwards, the movement consisted of two political parties, the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party, each with its own subordinate or coalition organizations.Communist Party members join the Kuomintang in their personal capacity.For Communists, this has both advantages and disadvantages.The advantage is that the Communist Party can be allowed to influence the formulation and implementation of the KMT's policies, and transform the party; the disadvantage is that she also allows the KMT to know who the Communist Party is and what they are doing.This approach was acceptable to both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party at that time.

Sun Yat-sen, as in the past, was the undisputed leader of a new revolutionary movement that could not have brought about political change without recognizing the necessity of having its own army.The reason why the old revolutionary movement failed was that it relied too much on capricious soldiers, and there was no way to defeat the warlords except by using military force to defeat the warlords.Encouraged by Borodin, Sun Yat-sen turned to the Soviet Union for help. In October 1924, General Vasily Brucher arrived in Guangzhou to serve as Sun Yat-sen's military adviser.He used the pseudonym Galen in China, and he was accompanied by some other Soviet officers.In the same month, the first batch of Soviet weapons and equipment arrived in Guangzhou from the port of Odessa on the Black Sea by speedboat.

Five months before Galen's arrival, a military academy had opened in Huangpu, on the Pearl River, south of Canton.As if by fate, Sun Yat-sen appointed Chiang Kai-shek as the principal of the school.Chiang Kai-shek was an officer who firmly supported Sun against Yuan Shikai and was trained in Japanese military academy.To enforce military discipline and details of etiquette, Chiang set to work with great enthusiasm, and by the end of the year had trained two officers, five hundred each.At this stage, the Chinese revolutionary movement was internally split into several factions: Marxist revolutionaries were committed to class struggle against landlords and capitalists;Regarding these factions, Chiang showed no political inclination at that time.He worked friendly with Galen and in 1925 was preparing to send his son Chiang Ching-kuo to study in Moscow.

1925 was a year of change.In March of that year, Sun Yat-sen went to Beijing to participate in a so-called "National Reconstruction Conference" convened by the warlords.Beijing was controlled by warlords at the time.There Sun died of liver cancer at the age of fifty-nine.From February to May, Chiang Kai-shek won a series of victories against the warlords based near Canton.Towards the end of this period, the May 30th incident in Shanghai, mentioned in the previous chapter, accelerated the growth of nationalist and communist ranks.Entering 1925, the Communist Party had only a few thousand members, and by the end of the year it had about ten thousand members, and her youth league had about one party more members.And in June, Kuomintang leaders installed a provisional government in Guangzhou and announced the formation of the National Revolutionary Army. In August, Mr. Liao Zhongkai, who strongly advocated cooperation with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, was assassinated in Guangzhou.This created serious tensions in the revolutionary movement and had crucial implications for future development, while also drawing Chiang Kai-shek into politics.Chiang Kai-shek appointed a committee to investigate the murder.The committee did not find out what organization or individual had murdered Liao, but it found that the national campaign right was conspiring to get rid of all senior KMT veterans who favored following the Soviet Union and supporting continued cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party, which led to the Guangzhou The political balance is strongly tilted to the left.At the Kuomintang Congress held in January 1926, leftist Kuomintang and Communist Party members dominated the proceedings and took control of the new Central Executive Committee.Known or suspected right-wing conspirators were expelled from Canton, or into northern warlord territory, or, poetically, "educated" in Moscow. Chiang made no public objection to this, and throughout the In the winter of 1925-1926, he continued to work closely with Borodin and Galen.

Deng Xiaoping spent eleven months in Moscow.At first he studied at the Communist University of the Eastern Laborers.The university was founded in 1921 to educate Asian workers from inside and outside the Soviet Union in revolutionary theory and methods.It existed for almost two decades, cultivating a stable force in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and North Korea.This force manipulated the party and government institutions of the Soviet Union and Mongolia, and promoted the development of revolutions everywhere.In the 1920s, hundreds of Chinese Communist Party members, including Liu Shaoqi and Ren Bishi, who rose to high positions in the party, studied at the school.Under the complete control of the Soviet regime, it was open only to members of the Communist Party, so it attracted little international attention or tension in Soviet politics.

A few weeks later, Deng Xiaoping transferred to Sun Yat-sen University.Founded by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the fall of 1925 to train men for the Chinese revolution, the university later became a bone of contention within China and a site of constant power struggles between Stalin and Trotsky.Five years later, Stalin decided that the university was more trouble than it was worth and decided to close it. It stands to reason that the university was jointly managed by the Chinese Kuomintang and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and a senior member of the Kuomintang also served as a director of the school.Its source of funding is still a mystery. One legend is that the Soviet Party imitated the practice of the French government in 1920 and drew Boxer Indemnity Fund; another legend is that the Kuomintang persuaded some wealthy Chinese businessmen to send money to the school on a regular basis.Regardless of where the money came from, the university was well-funded, and all students were given stipends, and food, housing, and clothing were free.

The university had a large number of teachers and administrators, and its rector, Karl Rhodes, was a Polish man who had acted as a mediator between Lenin and the German imperial government in 1917.He is a linguist who is proficient in many languages ​​and has the reputation of a university scholar. He lives in a rough manner and always likes to have a cigarette pipe in his mouth.He likes to give speeches and can often speak for more than two hours at a time.Although he had never been to China, the subject of his lectures was the Chinese revolutionary movement.Many of his listeners must have been amazed at his gift of reasoning.

However, Rhodes was loved by students.The twenty-five-year-old vice-principal, Miff, is a person who likes to show off very much, and is not popular with the students.As a member of the Far East Branch of the Comintern, he believed that the primary responsibility of the Communist parties outside the Soviet Union was to defend the Soviet state, and the fundamental function of the Comintern was to ensure the implementation of this goal.In this university, Miff's main task is to find young Chinese who can accept these views.According to his selection requirements, he was looking for students who were bright and enthusiastic about Marxist theory, but without any practical political experience. He spent very little time with other students, so students naturally resented him. In 1927, after the collapse of the Chinese United Front and the start of Stalin's campaign to depose Trotsky, Miff ruthlessly persecuted many communist students because they believed that Trotsky's political views on China were more correct than Stalin's.

Miff successfully organized a secret group known in China as the "Returned Students", the "Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks", or, unceremoniously, "Stalin's Chinese Group".From 1931 to 1935, their leaders controlled the Chinese Communist Party, implementing what is now called the false "third leftist line" of political and military strategies. In 1945, Mao Zedong formally rejected this line in a resolution on the history of the party.This resolution is a masterpiece of sharp criticism, which insists on the self-criticism of the supporters of the wrong line.However, the resolution does not say that this line was caused by Moscow.Or it is precisely because this line came from Moscow that its followers had to obey it.Ironically, even though the real villain during this period was Stalin, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, Mao became the most important communist in defending Stalin everywhere.Therefore, he was much more concerned about safeguarding Stalin's reputation in China than Mif's disciples. The most important members of this secret group were Chen Shaoyu (his pen name during the revolution was Wang Ming), Qin Bangxian (Bo Gu), Zhang Wentian (Luo Fu) and Wang Jiaxiang.They are all versatile.Wang Ming can write eloquently.About Bo Gu, Edgar Snow’s first wife, Helen Foster Snow, was like this in 1937 (Edgar Snow was an American traveler and writer, in the summer of 1936 he was in the Communist base area of ​​northern Shaanxi After four months of interviews, he wrote a book called "China under the Red Star" ("Westward Journey"), which is a classic that can be used as both an adventure story and a vivid report. He reported to the world for the first time that communism in China was not a hearsay or nationalist propaganda. Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and many leaders, including Deng Xiaoping, all talked to Snow about their early lives. --Original note) described "He is a typical Chinese intellectual. If you take a cartoon, you can describe him as thin, frail, overworked, and half-morbid. He wears deep glasses. His thick, unkempt hair gives people A feeling that seems top-heavy" ③.But he was very brave (in the early 1930s he risked arrest and execution in Shanghai longer than almost all Communist leaders).He quickly admitted that as an intellectual, he needs someone to teach him how workers live and what they need. Luo Fu is five to six years older than Wang Ming and Bo Gu, and knows a lot about the world.His father was a businessman and scholar, and he himself was only a scholar.He spent two years in California, took some college courses, worked for the Overseas Chinese Magazine in San Francisco, and spoke English very well.Wang Jiaxiang, who does not have a pen name, is another brave man who endured stomach problems with great perseverance before and during the Long March, and who used his unique insights to help Deng Xiaoping when he fell out of political favor in 1933. he. According to people who studied Deng Xiaoping, Deng did not know these students who returned from Moscow.This may not be true.He must have known that the Vice-Chancellor had enlisted a group of cronies, or at least heard their names or met them.Wang Ming and Bo Gu are in another class, probably because they can speak Russian.Judging from Deng's firm patriotism and strong opinions, it is impossible for him to have too many contacts with those who obey no matter what foreigners say. When Deng first arrived at Sun Yat-sen University, the number of students in the school was about two to three hundred, and it had doubled by the end of 1926. About half of the students were communists, party members, league members, or both. identity.Among these people, only a dozen were from Western Europe, and the rest were almost all college graduates and students from North and East China.The other students are members of the Kuomintang, and very few have relations with the leaders of the Kuomintang.Deng had two such classmates, one was Chiang Kai-shek's son Jiang Jingguo (only seventeen years old in 1925), and the other was General Feng Yuxiang's daughter Feng Funeng. After China's united front collapsed in 1927, the composition of the students changed.The Kuomintang students disappeared. Some asked to return to China; some were forced to return; a few were arrested and sentenced to coolie labor after trial.Chiang Ching-kuo was forced to stay, and he was sent to work in the Siberian gold mines for a period of time and remained in the Soviet Union until 1937 when the KMT and the Communist Party formed a new united front and was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union.After these Kuomintang students left, they were replaced by Communist Party members.Some of these party students were older (Wu Yuzhang, the founder of Deng Xiaoping's preparatory school in Chongqing, was one of them); some were party cadres; some were factory workers.For these workers, university teaching has to be simplified. But Deng's schoolwork load at that time was very heavy. There were seven courses in total, namely foreign languages, history, philosophy, political economy, economic geography, Leninism and military science.Of all the foreign languages, Russian is compulsory and English, French and German are listed as electives.The content of the history class is the history of social formation development and revolution and the history of revolutionary movements.The philosophy class is the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels.Political economy is majoring in Marx's "Das Kapital".The course on Leninism was based on a series of lectures that Stalin delivered at Sverdlov University in April 1924, shortly after Lenin's "Book published).Military science includes a practical component: training in shooting and basic tactics.It is not clear how Deng reacted to these courses, but as someone who used book knowledge and Marxism-Leninism as a source of wisdom, Deng's attitude was quite clear, as can be seen from his talk in the spring of 1992: "Learning Marxism-Leninism must be precise and effective. Long-form articles are read by a small number of professional people. How do the masses read them? It is required to read big books, which is formalistic and impossible. My introductory teacher is "The Communist Manifesto." " and "ABC of Communism". Recently, some foreigners commented that Marxism cannot be defeated. It cannot be defeated not because there are too many big books, but because the truth of Marxism is unbreakable. Seeking truth from facts is the essence of Marxism We must advocate this, not books. The success of our reform and opening up does not depend on books, but on practice, and on seeking truth from facts....Practice is the only criterion for testing truth."④ While Deng was studying, China's Northern Expedition began and was victorious, but politically the left was forced to relinquish some control. Beginning in March 1926, Chiang Kai-shek broke with the Soviet military advisers, the leftists of the Kuomintang, and the Communist Party, and suppressed these three parties.The crisis arose when a gunboat commanded by a Communist officer was moored at Whampoa close to Chiang's headquarters, the vessel being fired with unknown intent*.Jiang suspects that this is a ＊The "Zhongshan ship incident" is a conspiracy of Chiang Kai-shek, not the responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party. After this conspiracy, martial law was issued in Guangdong, troops loyal to him were dispatched to disarm the workers' pickets and the gunboat was seized, and more than 30 Soviet soldiers were also detained. After taking power, Chiang then asked three Soviet advisers whom he particularly disliked to leave Guangdong, and demanded that the Communist political workers be withdrawn from the First Army.It is required that the activities of the Communist Party members in the Kuomintang be made public from now on.Perhaps in order to show his political fairness, he also asked several KMT right-wing politicians to leave Guangdong.Galen and Borodin, who had left Guangdong and were in the north when the Zhongshan incident occurred, only adhered to Moscow's dogma, fearing that they would destroy the united front. Chiang also had the agreement of Galen and Borodin that the army would march north as soon as the military was ready, another victory for the National Revolution. At the beginning of 1927, both Stalin and Trotsky hoped to keep the army in the south, because the Soviet Union had concluded that the Soviet Union needed to establish friendly relations with Japan to safeguard its own interests, which required that the Kuomintang could not take actions to deter Japan.The Communist Party in Guangdong, from leaders to ordinary soldiers, insisted on taking military action as soon as possible, but the Party Central Committee in Shanghai sided with the Soviet Union, believing that the time for action might not be ripe.Therefore, the Shanghai side was later criticized by the party because it completely echoed the position of the Soviet Union. The Northern Expedition began in June 1926, and fierce fighting took place in Hubei. After forty days of siege, Wuchang was conquered, and Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province, was captured after three battles.Some troops, including some of the strongest, suffered heavy casualties.As the army moved forward, a mass movement followed. The main targets of the movement were unpopular landlords, what Mao Zedong called "local tyrants and evil gentry, and foreigners." In January 1927, Hankou, a city on the banks of the Yangtze River, , The British Concession in Jiujiang was taken back. Anti-Christian activities occurred in Hunan, leading to the withdrawal of some missionary institutions and the closure of most missionary schools. By the end of 1926, the Northern Expedition had captured most of the warlord-controlled area south of the Yangtze River.Its success shocked the world and completely changed the balance of power in China. It looked like a second storm of revolution, and Sun Yat-sen's revolution was a complete success.Chiang Kai-shek himself, commander-in-chief and internationally recognized national symbol, was in a much stronger political position than before he left Guangdong.He made it clear that he was opposed to urban or rural social revolutions, and he did not want to harm the interests of foreigners and foreigners too much.The Communist Party saw this development clearly, and the report of the Central Committee in January 1927 made this analysis: The right wing of the Kuomintang is becoming more and more powerful... There is currently a very strong anti-Soviet, anti-Communist, and anti-workers and peasants movement in the Kuomintang. This rightward inclination is firstly due to the credo held by Chiang Kai-shek and others: only one party can exist in this country, all classes should cooperate, class struggle should be prohibited, there is no need for a Communist Party... The second reason is that they believe that the national revolution will soon be successful, that a class revolution will occur soon, and that the biggest enemy at present is not imperialism and militarism but the Communist Party... It is precisely for these reasons that the Kuomintang A strong anti-communist trend was set off...⑥. It was Feng Yuxiang, a warlord, who facilitated Deng Xiaoping's return to China. More popular than most other warlords, Feng has gone down in history as a Christian general.He is both a Christian and a noble Chinese traditionalist.He believes it is a leader's responsibility to lead by example and care about the well-being of ordinary people.As a soldier, he looks very simple in clothes, unlike most warlords who show off their might and are well-clothed.He is approachable and gets along well with his officers and soldiers.He advocated convincing others with virtue instead of abusing punishment to his subordinates.He encouraged his troops to sing on the march and taught Christian hymns as marches.This is partly because of his eccentricity, but mostly because he is a man of integrity, eager to build his country well.So in addition to his army, ordinary people also love him very much. In 1924, Feng Yuxiang, who was based in northwest China, took Beijing while Wu Peifu and Zhang Zuolin, the other leading warlords in the north, were fighting.He then sought help from the Soviet Union to prop up his position against Wu Peifu and Zhang Zuolin.At that time, Borodin came to the north from Guangdong and accepted Feng Yuxiang's request as a potential alliance between the Soviet Union and the southern Kuomintang.According to Borodin's suggestion, Russia decided to provide Feng with weapons, funds, and military commanders. At the same time, he also sent him political advisers he did not want to accept, and provided his officers with the opportunity to study at the Soviet Military Academy.At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party decided to send a group of young people from Shanghai and Beijing, including some who had received military training in the Soviet Union, to work in its troops. Despite the aid, Feng's army was defeated by "Northeast King" Zhang Zuolin in early 1926.With the usual gesture of a defeated Chinese general, Feng announced his resignation as commander.He made plans to visit Moscow.The Russians probably didn't want him to visit at this time, but he was determined to go.Because he calculated that it was impossible for the Russians to refuse to receive a person who had accepted their assistance and was of political and military importance.At this time, the Northern Expedition was about to begin.He took his time on the road and first went to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Outer Mongolia (Mongolian People's Republic).There he met several times with Borodin.If Borodin could not figure out Feng's true intentions before Feng's arrival in Moscow, his favorable position in Moscow would be compromised.After a month-long layover, Feng arrived in Moscow in early May. Feng stayed in Moscow for three full months.He met almost daily with Soviet leaders (although Stalin was not included), visited Sun Yat-sen University, and gave speeches (likely Deng Xiaoping included) to the students, which were filled with revolutionary enthusiasm and warmly received by the students.He played his cards tactfully.He knew that the Russians were eager for him to return to Zhonghui. He took advantage of the anxiety of the Russians to obtain quite favorable terms of assistance from the Soviet Union, including providing him with a large sum of money and a large amount of military equipment, and training his officers.Satisfied, he drafted a statement of public and formal support for the National Revolution.And the promise was quickly fulfilled. On September 17, when he crossed Mongolia again to find his troops, he was officially back in command.In Wuyuan, a desert town north of the Yellow River, he led his officers in drafting a "popular oath" in support of the National Revolution. Accompanying Feng back were several Soviet military advisers and several Communist Party members.According to Deng Xiaoping's official biography, Feng had asked the Comintern to "send a group of Chinese comrades to work in his army"⑦.It is likely that the Comintern convinced him to accept them, stating that there should be communists in his army, as a symbol of his acceptance of the revolutionary united front.However the matter was decided, he allowed the Comintern to send a new batch of Communist activists to his troops. The leader of the Chinese group was Liu Bojian, who had served as the secretary of the Communist Youth League in France and had received Soviet military and political training in Moscow. In the spring of 1927, he served as the deputy director of Feng's military political department.At that time, Feng's headquarters was located in Xi'an, and a new political and military academy was established in the city. Deng Xiaoping then returned home.According to his biography, perhaps he was selected by the Comintern, perhaps Liu Bojian invited him to go there, or he volunteered to go there (although it is not recorded in his biography that he met Feng in Moscow).His journey began at the end of 1926. He first took a train, passed Ulan Kud on the Trans-Siberian Railway, then changed cars to Ulaanbaatar, Yinchuan and Lanzhou in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, and finally arrived in Xi'an.He started by train, then by truck, then by camel and horse, and traveled a long way.The most uncomfortable journey must be the Gobi Desert, and he took an ammunition truck. In January, the temperature in the Gobi Desert can drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius, and there are more than 500 miles between Ulaanbaatar and the Yellow River.Deng arrived in Xi'an in February 1927. Notes: ①Spencer: "Modern China Studies", p. 323. ② "Biography of Deng Xiaoping", page 5. ③Helen Snow: "Communists in China", p. 229. ④ "Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping" Volume III, page 382. ? ⑤ Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Vol. 1, p. 25. ⑥ "Cambridge History" Volume 12, page 607. ⑦ "A Brief Biography of Deng Xiaoping", page 5.