Chapter 14 14. Unusual meetings

On January 9, 1935, the Red Army General Headquarters and the leaders of the Red Army arrived in Zunyi City successively.Zunyi is located in the northeast of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau. It is an important town in northern Guizhou and the second largest city in Guizhou, second only to the provincial capital Guiyang.It has been raining that day, but it does not prevent the Red Army from holding a grand entry ceremony.Soldiers, covered in mud, stopped outside the city to wash their faces and hands, and entered the city singing the military song "Three Disciplines and Eight Points of Attention".The lyrics are the rules of action formulated by Zhu and Mao for the troops: speak kindly, return things borrowed from the common people, follow orders in actions, and do not damage crops... At that time, there was no army of the Kuomintang Central Army and various local warlords with such strict discipline as the Red Army. discipline.People in Zunyi City stood on both sides of the street, placed cigarettes, tea, wine, and pastries, beat gongs, drums, and set off firecrackers to welcome the Red Army.

Before the Red Army entered Guizhou, only Wang Jialie's four divisions were guarding Guizhou. They were all two-handed soldiers with weak combat effectiveness.But on the day Mao Zedong and the others entered Zunyi, Zhou Hunyuan and Wu Qiwei of the Kuomintang Central Army took over Guiyang.Chiang Kai-shek took command in Chongqing and mobilized some troops from the Hunan Army, Sichuan Army and Yunnan Army, about 400,000 people, and more than 30,000 people who were preparing to besiege the Red Army. After arriving in Zunyi, the Red Army discovered that the idea of ​​establishing a Soviet area in this area (the decision made at the Liping Conference) was simply not feasible.The enemy army is gathering more and more, and Zunyi's geographical location is also very unfavorable to the Red Army. It is surrounded by water on three sides, with the Wujiang and Qianjiang Rivers on the east, Chishui on the west, and the rolling Yangtze River on the north. The enemy is blocked.Moreover, the economy of the Zunyi area is backward. Although it is rich in opium, it has become a big problem to supply the army with food.If a base is established here, the Red Army will soon be completely wiped out by the Kuomintang army.

According to the proposal of the Liping Conference, the Red Army decided to hold an enlarged Politburo meeting in Zunyi. What strategies and actions.Since the Red Army began the Long March, there has been no respite, no time to seriously review the mistakes made, and a major meeting is imminent. The meeting was held in the best bungalow in Zunyi City.This beautiful house is the mansion of Bai Zhanghui, the commander of the Second Division of the Qian Army, and it has been newly built for less than two years.Bai Zhanghui, like most warlords, runs a family business. He and his brothers are engaged in business and banking, and are well-known locally.His house combines traditional Chinese architecture with some styles of Western architecture, with cornices on the roof and wide verandahs.There is also a big pagoda tree next to the house.At that time, Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao were arranged to live in this comfortable house. Deng Yingchao remembered that she once stood on the balcony on the second floor picking leaves of locust trees.Some other leaders, Zhu De and Kang Keqing, Peng Dehuai, and Liu Shaoqi also lived here.Mao Zedong lived in another warlord's house with Wang Jiaxiang and Luo Fu. It was their "conspiracy" on stretchers along the way that led to the successful convening of the Zunyi Conference.

For several days in a row, Zhou Enlai was busy preparing the military report for the meeting, and he couldn't get 3 hours of sleep every day.The principled differences between him and Li De, the representative of the Communist International, made the two face each other coldly.At the channel meeting, Zhou Enlai had already expressed strong dissatisfaction with Li Desheng's rigid military command.Regarding the issue of military leadership and military strategy, the leadership of the Red Army was divided into two different camps.Li De, Bo Gu, and Kai Feng (He Kequan) still insist on their wrong views, and Kai Feng tried to persuade Nie Rongzhen to support them, but failed.Mao Zedong received strong support from Wang Jiaxiang and Luo Fu. ——Zhou Enlai has also completely leaned towards Mao Zedong and others. He knows that the military report he will give at the meeting is a very sensitive issue.These days, he calmly thinks about the mistakes the Red Army has made in the past, trying to sort out the root of the mistakes and find a solution.His report was scribbled and changed, and he deliberated over and over again several times...

On January 15, 1935, at 7 o'clock in the evening, the Zunyi Conference was held in a large room in Bai Zhanghui's mansion.The furnishings in the room are simple, with a dilapidated square table in the center and a circle of chairs.It was cold, and there was a small iron stove with charcoal fire under the table.There were 20 people present at the meeting, and not only members of the Politburo, but also all military leaders, regiment commanders and political commissars of various regiments participated in the meeting. Wang Jiaxiang and Nie Rongzhen attended the meeting on stretchers.Nie Rongzhen's foot was injured in the Battle of Xiangjiang, and he was not treated in time. After entering Guizhou, it began to fester and was recuperating.Wang Jiaxiang's injuries have a long history. As early as April 1933, during the fourth anti-"encirclement and suppression" campaign, he was hit in the abdomen by shrapnel.Because of the extremely poor medical conditions, the 8-hour operation failed to suture his wound, so he had to insert a rubber tube to save his life.But the wound was often inflamed, causing a persistent high fever and often requiring morphine for pain relief.It was not until 1936, when Wang Jiaxiang went to Moscow for treatment, that his illness was completely cured.Deng Xiaoping also attended the meeting. He was the editor-in-chief of the "Red Star Newspaper" at the time and took the minutes of the meeting as the secretary-general of the Central Secretariat.Li De attended the meeting as a non-voting representative, and Wu Xiuquan served as his interpreter.

The meeting was presided over by Bo Gu, who was the secretary of the Secretariat of the Central Committee and was the first to speak. He talked about Chiang Kai-shek's fifth "encirclement and suppression campaign", objectively analyzed the military situation at that time, and criticized his own mistakes in the military line.But he attributed the Red Army's military failure to the strength of the Kuomintang troops and the poor coordination of the Red Army outside the Central Soviet Area.He tried to justify being wrong. Zhou Enlai's military report was prepared after several days of careful preparation. When he spoke, he solemnly admitted that the strategy for dealing with the enemy was wrong, and that the Red Army's tradition of guerrilla warfare should not be abandoned and turned to positional warfare. root cause of failure.He has a frank and sincere attitude, and is willing to bear the serious consequences of wrong military command, even though the consequences have been irreparable.

Zhou Enlai's speech made Li De feel uneasy.From the conception to the holding of the Zunyi Conference, Li De had already been excluded.As soon as the meeting started, he was in a difficult situation.Others were sitting around the long table, but Li De was sitting at the door of the conference room. Wu Xiuquan described him as "completely a person under trial in the dock".While listening to the speech, Li De kept smoking, looking very depressed.He believed that Zhou Enlai had kept a certain distance from him and Bogu during his speech. After Zhou Enlai finished his report, Zhang Wentian made a report opposing the "Left" military line.The outline he based his report on was actually a consensus reached by Mao Zedong, Wang Jiaxiang, and the three of them on a stretcher along the way (in the previous article, we called this consensus a "conspiracy" on a stretcher).

Mao Zedong spoke right after Zhang Wentian.Usually, he always listens to other people's opinions before making a conclusive conclusion.But this time he was uncharacteristically speaking first.He spoke for about an hour, and compared to other people's speeches, his speeches can be regarded as grand. He pointed sharply at Bo Gu and Li De.In the fifth campaign against "encirclement and suppression", Li De's "short assault" tactics replaced the Red Army's practical mobile warfare (Mao Zedong once summed up the sixteen-character formula: the enemy advances and we retreat, the enemy is stationed and we are harassed, the enemy is tired and we fight, the enemy Under his command, the Red Army fought against Chiang Kai-shek regardless of the difference in military strength, and the result was a crushing defeat.In the first four counter-campaigns against "encirclement and suppression", the Red Army searched for opportunities in mobile warfare and won all battles against the Kuomintang troops several times its size. However, in the fifth counter-campaign against "encirclement and suppression", wrong tactics forced the Red Army to abandon the great transfer to the Central Soviet Area.Therefore, the reason for the failure of the Red Army's fifth counter-campaign against "encirclement and suppression" was not the problem of the number of troops mentioned by Bo Gu, but a problem of tactics. ——Mao Zedong proposed that the Red Army must first solve the problem of military line.Bo Gu and Li De made the mistakes of "conservatism when defending", "adventurism when attacking" and "escapeism when transferring".Li De's command blindly talks about soldiers on paper: without considering whether the soldiers have to walk, eat and sleep, whether they walk on flat roads or mountain roads, whether the terrain is plains or rivers, they spread out the map and draw it with a pencil (Li De was ironically called "the A strategist who leads by a pencil"), within the time limit, this battle must be fought. ——It is of course not good to fight a war like this.

Mao Zedong also lashed out at the failure of the Red Army to unite with the 19th Route Army in the Soviet area, and the Red Army lost a great opportunity to obtain an allied army.If the Red Army can take advantage of this opportunity, it can go around behind the enemy and attack in a detour, forcing the enemy to return to help and reduce the pressure on the Central Soviet Area.Zhou Enlai, Luo Fu and him all advocated joining forces with the 19th Route Army to fight. Mao Zedong's speech won warm applause from everyone.He expressed the aspirations of many commanders that the problems on Chinese soil must be solved by the Chinese themselves, and there is no need for foreigners to direct them blindly.

Wu Xiuquan recalled that during Zhang Wentian's fifth campaign against "encirclement and suppression", he said to him, "How can Li De command like this?"Bo Gu accused Zhang Wentian of treating the Russian Revolution in 1905 the same as Plekhanov.Zhang Wentian refused to accept it, so he quarreled with Bogu.Li De came to persuade them to fight, saying that the affairs here should be handled by those who came back from Moscow, and they should not cause internal friction.Although Zhang Wentian graduated from Sun Yat-Sen University in Moscow like Bogu, he is not as obedient as Bogu. He believes that China's affairs cannot be completely listened to by Li De, and he must have his own ideas.Later, both Zhang Wentian and Wang Jiaxiang (in 1925, Wang and Zhang went to study in the Soviet Union on the same boat) fully supported Mao Zedong, especially at the Zunyi Conference.Following Mao Zedong's speech, Wang Jiaxiang was the first to speak out in support of Mao Zedong.Wang Jiaxiang made it clear at the meeting that Bo Gu and Li De must give way, and Mao Zedong will command the Red Army.

Li De repeatedly defended himself that he was only a consultant of the Comintern and only provided advice for the Chinese revolution.Now things are messed up, and it is the Chinese comrades who messed up, not him.Li De has never admitted any mistakes, and his attitude remains the same in his later memoirs.Why did Li De, a foreigner, gain absolute leadership over the Chinese Red Revolution for a period of time?This is an important question worthy of our deep thinking, but no matter what, after the Zunyi Conference was held, Li De's command was completely removed.In fact, the fiasco of the Xiangjiang Battle had already declared the end of Li De and Bogu's wrong leadership in the party. The Zunyi meeting was held for three consecutive days, because there were too many things to discuss and it was too necessary.It usually starts at 7 o'clock in the evening, and every four or five hours, guards come in from time to time to pour tea and change water.The words of the participants became more and more fierce, and more and more people stood on Mao Zedong's side, and gradually figured out the clues of the Red Army's next move. Nie Rongzhen and Liu Bocheng suggested that the Red Army should cross the Yangtze River and establish a new base in northwest Sichuan.The conditions in Sichuan are better than those in Guizhou, and it is known as the Land of Abundance.The transportation is more convenient than Guizhou, and the population is larger. The conflict between the Sichuan Army and the Kuomintang Central Army is relatively large. The Red Army can properly use this contradiction... This suggestion has won the support of most people.Although Mao Zedong did not advocate crossing the Yangtze River north (he advocated the establishment of Sichuan and Guizhou border bases), he obeyed the decision of the meeting.Chen Bojun, who was the chief of staff of the Fifth Red Army Corps at the time, later recalled that Mao Zedong made a metaphor for his situation at the meeting, "The Zunyi meeting borrowed someone else's pier to fight the war." In the end, Zhou Enlai suggested to stop the work of Bo Gu, Li De and his "three-person group", and this proposal was unanimously approved.The military command of the Red Army was shared by Zhu De and Zhou Enlai.Mao Zedong was elected as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee.The Standing Committee internally decided to re-divide labor, and how to divide labor was not discussed in depth at the meeting. At the Zunyi Conference, Mao Zedong was not assigned a military command, but he was able to advise and participate in military decision-making and was no longer excluded from the senior leadership of the Red Army.Wu Xiuquan made a very interesting evaluation of the leadership of the Red Army at that time: under the ideological guidance of Comrade Mao Zedong and the specific command of Comrade Zhou Enlai.But it was only a matter of time before Mao Zedong took the helm of the Red Army himself. After Li De was revoked from the Central Military Advisory Authority, he volunteered to act with Lin Biao's Red First Army. ——It is said that Li De admired Lin Biao's military talent, even though he had little contact with Lin Biao before.Lin Biao treated him very well, but Li De was in a very bad mood at this time. Chiang Kai-shek did not get the news of the Zunyi meeting until February. The comeback of his old opponent Mao Zedong was not good news for Chiang Kai-shek.From then on, there will be a more tortuous and complicated game of "cat and mouse" between the Kuomintang warlords and the Red Army.