The founding of the Chinese Red Army

In the spring of 1928, in the Jinggang Mountains on the border of the Chinese provinces of Hunan and Jiangxi, two small Communist forces joined up: the remnants of the troops that had mutinied at Nanchang in August 1927, led by Zhu De, and the peasant army of Mao Zedong, which had survived the failed Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan. Together they formed the 4th Workers’ and Peasants’ Army, with Zhu De as commander and Mao as party representative. In the same weeks the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai decided that the troops in Communist-held areas would henceforth officially be called the Red Army. Thus was born the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, from which the People’s Liberation Army later grew. For the next twenty years it fought the Kuomintang government and the Japanese, and in 1949 it won the whole of mainland China for the Communists.

Which date?

Popular chronologies list 28 May 1928 as the day the Chinese Red Army was founded. The sources do not confirm that anything particular happened on that day. The birth of the Red Army is spread over several dates. The People’s Liberation Army itself regards 1 August 1927, the day of the Nanchang Uprising, as its founding day, and has celebrated it as Army Day since 1933. The forces of Zhu De and Mao Zedong joined up in the second half of April 1928. Chinese sources give various days, most often 28 April, and a ceremonial rally to mark the union was held on 4 May in the small town of Longshi in Ninggang County. On 25 May 1928 the party’s Central Committee issued Circular No. 51, “An Outline of Military Work”, in which it decided that the troops in Communist-held areas would officially be called the Red Army instead of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army, as before. On 4 June the party leadership wrote to Zhu De and Mao that their force could henceforth call itself the Red Army, and shortly afterwards the 4th Army took the name of the 4th Red Army. The date of 28 May thus falls between the leadership’s decision and its implementation.

After the massacre

Until 1927 the Chinese Communists had no army of their own. Under the First United Front they worked inside the Kuomintang, and their people served in the National Revolutionary Army as officers and political commissars. Everything changed after the Shanghai massacre of April 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek crushed the Communists, and after the left-wing Kuomintang government in Wuhan broke with them in July. The party, which had lost most of its members, decided for the first time to take up arms against its former allies.

On 1 August 1927 in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi, units of the National Revolutionary Army in which the Communists had strong influence mutinied. They were directed by a front committee headed by Zhou Enlai and commanded by He Long, Ye Ting, Zhu De and Liu Bocheng. Some 20,000 soldiers took the city, but as early as 3–5 August they had to abandon it. In accordance with the Comintern’s plan they marched south to seize a port in Guangdong and receive help from the USSR. At the beginning of October they were routed near Shantou and Chaozhou. Zhou Enlai, seriously ill, escaped to Hong Kong. Zhu De, with a detachment of fewer than a thousand men, fought his way through the mountains and for a time took cover in the army of a local general, an old classmate from military school.

On 7 August 1927 the party leadership met in an emergency conference in Hankou. The defeat was blamed on the party’s leader until then, Chen Duxiu, who was replaced by Qu Qiubai. The conference resolved to stir up armed uprisings. It was then that Mao Zedong made the remark that later became one of his most famous slogans: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

The Autumn Harvest Uprising and the Jinggang Mountains

Mao was given the task of raising a revolt in Hunan at the time of the autumn harvest. On 9 September 1927 his units, made up of miners, peasants, mutinous soldiers and local militias, marched on Changsha, the provincial capital. Within a few days they were routed. Against the leadership’s instructions Mao did not attack the city a second time but led fewer than a thousand survivors into the mountains. At the end of September, in the village of Sanwan, he reorganised them into a single regiment and introduced the principle that became the foundation of the future army: party cells in every company and the authority of political commissars over commanders. In October he reached the Jinggang Mountains, a forested massif covering a few hundred square kilometres and accessible only by a handful of passes. It was ruled by two bandit leaders, Wang Zuo and Yuan Wencai. Mao made an alliance with them and incorporated their men into his force. He also introduced the first rules of discipline towards the population: obey orders, do not take so much as a sweet potato from the peasants, and hand over everything captured from the enemy. From these later grew the “Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention” of the Chinese Communist army.

In December 1927 the Communists, urged on by Comintern envoys, made one more attempt to seize a large city. The uprising in Canton, known as the Canton Commune, collapsed after less than three days and ended in the slaughter of thousands of participants. The experiences of Nanchang, Changsha and Canton convinced some of the Communists that the cities were, for the time being, beyond their reach. In January 1928 Zhu De raised a revolt in southern Hunan, but faced with the superior Kuomintang forces he had to withdraw eastwards, and in April he reached the Jinggang Mountains.

The birth of the 4th Army

The combined forces numbered, according to various estimates, from a few thousand to ten thousand men, including many poorly armed peasants. They were named the 4th Army, in reference to the “Ironsides” 4th Army of the National Revolutionary Army, from which some of the Nanchang soldiers came. Zhu De became commander, Mao party representative and secretary of the army committee, Wang Erzhuo chief of staff, and Chen Yi head of the political department. Zhu De was a professional officer who years before had served in the Yunnan provincial army and studied in Germany; Mao was a politician and an organiser of peasants. Their partnership proved so enduring that for years peasants and enemies alike spoke of the “Zhu-Mao army”, as if it were a single person.

In June 1928, in line with the party leadership’s decision, the force took the name of the 4th Red Army. In the summer and autumn it beat off expeditions by Kuomintang troops from Hunan and Jiangxi. In July 1928 at Pingjiang in Hunan a National Revolutionary Army regiment commanded by Peng Dehuai mutinied; it formed the 5th Red Army and in December joined Zhu De and Mao. At that time the Sixth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was meeting in Moscow; it declared the building of the Red Army and of rural bases to be one of the party’s main tasks, though it still pinned its hopes on future uprisings in the cities. In the USSR a power struggle was going on at the same time, in which Joseph Stalin defeated the opposition. Criticism of his China policy was among the main charges levelled by Trotsky, who had shortly before been expelled from the party.

From Jinggang to Yan’an

In January 1929 Zhu De and Mao left the Jinggang Mountains and moved to southern Jiangxi and western Fujian. In December 1929 the Gutian conference adopted a resolution subordinating the army to the party, which Mao later summed up in the formula that the party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the party. Further Red armies sprang up in other parts of China, among them He Long’s forces. According to various estimates, by 1930 they together numbered more than a hundred thousand soldiers. On 7 November 1931 in Ruijin the Communists proclaimed the Chinese Soviet Republic.

Chiang Kai-shek waged a series of encirclement campaigns against it. The first four, in 1930–1933, ended in defeat for the government forces. The fifth, prepared with the help of German military advisers, forced the main body of the Red Army to abandon Jiangxi in 1934. Thus began the Long March, in which, of the roughly 86,000 soldiers of the 1st Front Army who set out in October 1934, only a few thousand reached northern Shaanxi a year later. During the march Mao Zedong gained the upper hand in the party leadership. Yan’an became the Communists’ new centre.

The long shadow of the Red Army

The birth of the Chinese Red Army meant that the civil war in China, begun in 1927, did not end in a swift Kuomintang victory. The Nanjing government, which from the Jinan incident of May 1928 onwards was locked in an ever more serious conflict with Japan, had to wage war on the Communists at the same time throughout the 1930s. When the Japanese seized Manchuria in 1931, Chiang Kai-shek concluded that the Communists had to be destroyed first, and only then could the invader be confronted. Japan exploited the weakness of a divided China, and its propaganda also presented its expansion as a struggle against Bolshevism.

Only after the Xi’an incident in December 1936 did Chiang agree to a Second United Front. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937 the Red Army formally ceased to exist: its main forces in the north were converted into the Eighth Route Army, and the guerrilla units from the south into the New Fourth Army, nominally subordinate to the Kuomintang government. During the war with Japan the Communists waged mainly guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines and built up their forces and bases. By 1945 they had nearly a million regular soldiers. In the civil war that resumed in 1946, the army – known from 1947 as the People’s Liberation Army – defeated the Kuomintang, and on 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. Many of the commanders who had been in the Jinggang Mountains in 1928, among them Zhu De, Chen Yi and Peng Dehuai, became marshals of the People’s Republic, and Lin Biao, who had come there as a young officer with Zhu De’s force, later commanded the armies that conquered Manchuria.