The Nanchang Uprising and the Start of China's Red Army
China's Red Army began by flying the KMT Flag
The People’s Liberation Army is Founded – The Beginning of China’s Red Army
Welcome back to the Chinese Revolution. Last time, Chiang Kai-shek defeated a series of warlords to confirm his military supremacy in China, especially over regional and provincial armies that dared oppose him.
But one other Chinese force was slowly and quietly growing during this time. It was taking advantage of Chiang’s distraction with rebel warlords. The Communist Party of China, for the first time, had its own army. Let’s look at how the China’s Red Army (today’s People’s Liberation Army), began.
Let’s turn the clock back a little. When the Guomindang and Communist Party of China had collaborated, it was the Guomindang that had the army. Chiang Kai-shek had commanded its military academy and the Soviet Union had assisted with supplies, training and advisors. During the Northern Expedition, Chiang was Commander-in-Chief of the Nationalist Army, also known as the National Revolutionary Army. The Communists didn’t have their own army and collaborated with the Nationalists. But once Chiang and his Nanjing government turned on the Communists and purged them from the Guomindang political party, they were out in the cold mostly without weapons. The peasant associations and labour unions had few weapons and were no match for the provincial armies and other forces that cracked down on them.
Leon Trotsky in Moscow was very critical of the Comintern and Joseph Stalin for allowing this to happen. He had argued for arming the workers and peasants and setting up Soviets. Those are basically local councils run by workers and peasants. Trotsky was ejected from the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. But the idea of arming the people had traction and was acted on by the Communist Party of China.
On July 15, 1927, the KMT’s Wuhan government, led by Wang Jingwei, also ended its collaboration with Communists. Both camps in the Guomindang, the right led by Chiang Kai-shek and the left led by Wang Jingwei, had ejected Communists from the party.
While the Communists had no troops of their own, the Nationalists had plenty of soldiers and some of its commanders were sympathetic to communism. Moscow and by extension the Communist Party of China wanted to turn at least a portion of the Nationalist Army and to arm the Communist Party. Instead of building from scratch, they would try to take over some existing Army groups already supplied with weapons.
Zhou Enlai, future Premier of the People’s Republic, had been a leading Communist at the Whampoa Military Academy. He’s already been mentioned a few times, including among the Chinese Communists in France. When he had served at the Military Academy under Chiang Kai-shek, he had quietly inserted Communists into the Nationalist Army. Two weeks after Wuhan broke with the Communists and close to four months after Nanjing had done so, Zhou Enlai was secretary of new Front Committee at Nanchang, the provincial capital of Jiangxi. It’s a bit south of the Yangzi River. Zhou had identified generals at Nanchang who were Communist supporters. So that city was the focus of the Front Committee’s plans.
An uprising took place just after midnight on August 1st, 1927 and was a success. They did it in the name of the KMT as the national revolutionary party. They were trying to rekindle its revolutionary spirit and either to coopt its name or to try to turn the party back to a policy of cooperation with the Communists. They even waved the KMT flag. The non-communist troops were surprised and quickly disarmed. The local population barely noticed anything. To most appearances, it was just a change in command within the KMT. But a Revolutionary Committee was set up made up of 25 members. All of them, including the Communists, pledged loyalty to the Guomindang. The Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee was a Communist as was the Secretary -General. A Workers’ and Peasants’ Department was set up. Li Lisan, future leader of the Communist Party of China, was appointed to the Political Affairs Department. Zhou Enlai was in its Military Affairs Department. Some of the other members included a future Minister of National Defence and Foreign Minister of Communist China.
It plastered the city with slogans like “Down with Imperialism”, “Agrarian Reform”, “Confiscate Estates of over 100 mou”. That’s about 16 ½ acres or 6 2/3 hectares.
He Long was in command of the troops. The ordinary soldiers weren’t really Communist and fell in line because they understood that they would be returning to their home province of Guangdong. They weren’t keen to remain stationed in another province and were wanting to get closer to their families.
When Zhang Fakui, the overall military leader, learned of this revolt among his soldiers, he acted quickly. He was one of the rebels mentioned last episode who revolted against Chiang Kai-shek in 1929. But this Communist led uprising was in August 1927 and Zhang was still part of the Northern Expedition structure then. He and loyal troops marched on Nanchang and the Revolutionary Committee and the army groups led by Communists retreated south in the direction of the troops’ home province. Zhang retook the city without firing a single shot. The Nanchang Uprising had lasted about 5 days.
These troops did not march on Wuhan to restore that government or to form their own. The plan seems to have been to travel south to Guangdong. Officially, it was to establish a revolutionary base in the south and then to relaunch a second Northern Expedition under Communist leadership. But from the common soldier’s point of view, he was going home. The Northern Expedition had been won. The KMT was in power. It was time to return to family and the local speech and culture of Guangdong.
That first Red Army was not a model of cohesion and organization. One third of the soldiers that left Nanchang deserted early. Others fell ill drinking stagnant local water.
The leaders were being warned by Zhang Fakui, the same Nationalist commander whose troops had been taken and who was in charge militarily of Guangdong. He told them not to travel south to Guangzhou. So instead, the troops headed a bit east into the mountains. They were trying to avoid encountering other troops, but on August 24th, 1927, they met and did battle with the Nationalist Thirty-second Army. The Communist side lost 800 soldiers in 10 hours and gave up on the idea of advancing on Guangzhou.
Instead, most turned east and headed towards Fujian province, which is just north of Guangdong along the coast. They hoped that a Russian ship would be able to resupply them if they reached the ocean port of Shantou. Zhu De and the 25th Division remained behind to cover their retreat.
Some of those troops did reach the coast without fighting with the rest dragging behind. But no Russian ship arrived. Then Nationalist Generals from Guangdong reacted and encircled them on the coast. Other Communists held a town inland and there was a battle about 100 kilometers northwest of the coast, in Fujian. The troops then scattered, and the lucky ones were able to reach Hong Kong or Shanghai.
Zhu De, who will be a future Commander-in-Chief of the People’s Liberation Army (including during the Korean War), managed to escape that fate along with his troops. They had remained behind and now were low on supplies. Under a false name, Zhu and his group joined Nationalist General Fan Shisheng. Zhu pretended to be loyal to the Guomindang during this time and they were stationed north of Guangzhou. They took no part in the nearby Canton Commune.
That uprising was long planned by Communist Party leaders, under orders from the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of China at this time was under the leadership of Qu Qiubai, appointed with the blessing of Moscow, after Chen Duxiu was removed and blamed following the anti-Communist purges after the Northern Expedition. It is said that Qu and other Chinese Communists thought the plan was rash but they followed orders. The Comintern had a representative in Guangzhou (the city English speakers used to call Canton) and the Communist International was involved in the uprising. The organizers hoped that the Communist led soldiers from Nanchang would arrive and do the heaviest fighting, supported by local sympathisers. They also expected that Nationalist Generals would be fighting amongst themselves and distracted. This was the time when the Wuhan and Nanjing governments were negotiating to come together and there wasn’t a strong national government.
The Nanchang soldiers never arrived. 10,000 or 20,000 people took part in the insurrection, but they only had around 2000 rifles at the beginning. A Communist supporter Ye Jianying was in command of a training regiment in the city. They came over and that was a valuable addition to the rising. They managed to capture key locations like an ammunition factory, the police headquarters and military barracks. This added an additional 8000 weapons and freed 3000 prisoners. Ye had an important military career in the Chinese Revolution as well as in the People's Republic. He later lost his political role in Guangdong for not cracking down hard enough on small landowners. He kept his military credentials and in the 1970s, He later played a key role in the coup that ousted the Gang of Four following Mao’s death. That allowed Deng Xiaoping to come to power, who then opened China up to foreign trade and investment.
The expected peasant revolt in Guangzhou was weaker than expected. Only a few hundred took part. Nevertheless, the Communists surprised the locals, executed those who resisted, and took over key locations and briefly established a Soviet in that most important port in southern China. This time they did not claim to be Nationalists and attacked and banned the KMT in their propaganda. They also ordered the cancellation of debts, confiscations, and land redistribution.
But Guangzhou is as a trading city, close to Hong Kong and was for the most part, not pro-Communist. The locals generally did not support the insurrection. The Nationalists had already executed about 100 Communists earlier that year following the break of the two parties. Unions had also been reorganized and the Communists had lost their strong position in them. The Guomindang armies quickly responded to the Canton Commune and within days Nationalist troops had converged on the city. The fighting was fierce and may have been worsened by Comintern orders to hold on at any cost. The Commune only lasted about 2 days and the resulting purges, once the Nationalist Generals had control again, added to the death toll. Over 5000 insurgent deaths were reported with a similar number missing. The Russian consulate was attacked, and ten Russians were executed. The blame game among the surviving Communists began. It had been a costly and short uprising.
Trotsky, active in his criticisms of Stalin and the Comintern had this to say. “On the declining wave, while the depression still prevailed among the urban masses, the Canton “Soviet” uprising was hurriedly organized, heroic in the conduct of the workers, criminal in the adventurism of the leadership.”
Zhu and his group avoided all that. Early in 1928, Zhu left the Nationalist forces that he was hiding out in and his group moved north to the border of Hunan and Guangdong. They worked to build soviets and red guards there and to survive the expeditions launched against them by the Nationalists. One of his soldiers was the brother of Mao Zedong. The brother assisted with communications between Zhu and the future Chaiman Mao, who had established a Soviet in the nearby mountains. By April 1928, Zhu felt he couldn’t hold on alone and reached out to Mao Zedong through his brother.
I mentioned this briefly before during the Northern Expedition episode, but it’s worth mentioning again that Mao’s group had moved into the mountains in southeast Hunan province, close to Jiangxi, following the unsuccessful Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan province. Mao gave up on the idea of controlling the Hunan capital and instead moved south to the Ridge of Wells area with 1500 soldiers. He too lost troops to desertion, and he even allowed unhappy soldiers to leave, but not with their guns. When he was down to about 600 soldiers, Mao joined up with bandit chiefs who had men and about 120 rifles. Mao inched his way in. At first, he only said that they would be passing through on their way to the coast. They were allowed to stay but expected to do raiding to feed themselves. In one raid, they captured the county capital and held a public execution for the county chief. At another rally, at the time of Chinese New Year, a local landlord was executed and Mao read a short poem he had written:
“Watch us kill the bad landlords today.
Aren’t you afraid?
It’s knife slicing upon knife.”
Mao outmaneuvered the bandit bosses and the ordinary folk were incorporated into a regiment he controlled. He later had the original bandit leaders killed at a banquet.
The territory was good for defence. It was a collection of ridges and valleys covered with dense forests, with no roads. The locals knew ways to get away, with mud paths under thick cover. These routes led across provincial borders, which was helpful in case a provincial or local army descended on them.
But interestingly, Mao’s soldiers experienced more problems with the locals. The peasants didn’t appreciate the raiding. Especially because at that point, Mao’s interpretation of “the rich” included families with a few hens. Here is a description from a soldier following one of their raids.
“We usually surrounded the house of the landed tyrant, seizing him first and then starting to confiscate things. But this time as soon as we broke in, gongs sounded all of a sudden…and several hundred enemies emerged…They seized over forty of our men, locked them up in the clan temple…beat them and trussed them up, the women stamping on them with their feet. Then grain barrels were put over them, with big stones on top. They were so badly tortured.”
Those “several hundred enemies” would have been locals responding. They weren’t soldiers. Just local people defending their homes.
Many of the officers deserted Mao at this time. He began habits that he continued for years, to protect his own personal security. He moved between homes and always had an escape option, such as a hole in a wall where he could get away into the mountains. He also got into the practice of capturing nice homes, temples or schools and then using at least part of them as his personal residence. In Longshi, Mao’s headquarters had been an elite school. Now it was taken over and the leading local school closed. Despite Mao’s reputation, for the most part, he did not live rough. In this fifteen-month period, Mao only spent one month in the mountains. The rest seems to have been spent sleeping in villas or other buildings the Communists had taken over. He enjoyed eating rich food, including a lot of meat. Already now, in these early days, he had a lot of personal staff, including a manager, a cook, a cook’s assistant, a groom and secretaries. He made sure his favourite brand of cigarettes made it to him and he had books and newspapers collected for him after looting.
When Zhu’s diminished Red Army group arrived, it had about 3-4 times more men than Mao’s group. Zhu was leading the largest remaining Red Army detachment. But it had been wandering, following party orders to burn wealthy properties and even whole towns down. Then they would be chased out by soldiers and by peasants who were happy to be rid of the Reds. Now Zhu and his troops wanted a home. He arrived with local sympathisers who had done the burning. This was a deliberate Party policy.
To “get them to join the revolution…there is only one way: use Red terror to prod them into doing things that leave them with no chance to make compromises later with the gentry and bourgeoisie.”
As one man recalled: “I had suppressed counter-revolutionaries, so I could not live peacefully now. I had to go all the way…So I burned my own house with my own hands…and left”.
Mao and Zhu officially joined forces in a meeting on Longjiang Bridge in late April 1928. This event has been celebrated in the Communist history of China. Zhu became military commander of the combined forces and Mao became political representative, which was the higher rank. Zhu and Mao became closely associated. One feature of Chinese communism that started then and continues to this day is the supremacy of political leadership over the Red Army. The Communist Party and its political leaders are in charge, not the generals who work for the Party.
The timing of the Nanchang Uprising, the Autumn Harvest Uprising and the Canton Commune were poor. They happened after the Communists had been pushed out of the Nationalist Party, lost access to weapons and after many party members had been killed. The Communist leadership overestimated their strength, the desire of the people to resist the Nationalists and overestimated divisions within the KMT. No rebels were able to hold a city. They also cost the Communists a lot of their remaining early supporters. But they did start the Chinese Red Army, which would come to be known as the People’s Liberation Army. It can be traced to the brief Nanchang Uprising and the movement of these Communist led troops south. The survivors went into the hills and forests, especially in the borderlands between two provinces where they could better avoid detection and survive.
In 1929, Chiang Kai-shek did have a moment of peace between the Northern Expedition and the Central Plains War. The Nationalist troops were heading towards Mao and Zhu. So, in January 1929, Mao, Zhu and 3000 soldiers left.
They were not missed by the locals. Here is what a Communist Party inspector from Shanghai wrote looking back at this time.
“Before the Red Army came…there was quite an atmosphere of peaceful and happy existence…the peasants…had quite enough to live on…Since the Red Army came, things were totally changed. Because the Red Army’s sole income was robbing the rich…because even petty bourgeois, rich peasants and small pedlars were all treated as enemies, and because after great destruction, no attention was paid to construction or to the economic crisis, the countryside is totally bankrupt, and is collapsing by the day.”
Mao himself later admitted to failings during this early time in the countryside. As I explained in the Northern Expedition episode, Mao has said that he was too aggressive in these early days. He came to learn that it was better to gain the middle peasants, those that neither paid rent nor collected it, but grew their own crops. To gain them as allies by not taking their lands.
Mao was learning through experience and surviving. So too was the Red Army. They avoided Chiang’s troops now by moving on. They would do so again.
