Jianxi Soviet - founding and leadership

Question 1

Jianxi founding

Answer 1

• Mao was instructed to lead an attack on Changsha, instead took men and headed for the Jinggang Mountains on the border between Hunan and Jiangxi
• On November 7, 1931, the anniversary of the 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union helped organize a National Soviet People’s Delegates Conference in Ruijin (瑞金), Jiangxi province

Question 2

Jianxi stats

Answer 2

• reached a peak of more than 30,000 square kilometres
• 3 million people at peak
• Mao chairman of executive committee – not leadership of the CCP

Question 3

Jianxi reforms

Answer 3

• Soviet government carried out land reform based on a pragmatic view of social relations in the village – didn’t want to alienate any local people; exploitative rents abolished & fixed grain tax established
• universal reading classes
• Abolition of foot binding, forced marriages, child slavery, opium

Question 4

Jianxi requisitioning

Answer 4

summer 1935 target was 1 million dan of rice

• almost entire autumn harvest in the Soviet; used forced methods

Question 5

Jianxi Red Amry

Answer 5

Political commissars served alongside officers to spread Party ideology; no special treatment for officers

• The Three Main Rules of Discipline are as follows:
  1. Obey all orders in all your actions
  2. Do not take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses
  3. Turn in everything captured
• November and December 1933, out of at least 60,000 troops, there were 28,000 deserters in the Jiangxi Soviet
• urgent memo August 1934: “Three-quarters of the militia mobilized for the recent battles in the whole Soviet region ran away within the first few days”
• n one year more than 160,000 men had been drafted into the Red Army just to break the Fifth Campaign

Question 6

JIanxi leadership - 28 Bolsheviks

Answer 6

• group of Chinese students who studied at the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University from the late 1920s until early 1935, also known as the “Returned Students”.
• including: Wang Ming(王明), Bo Gu(博古); Zhang Wentian (张闻天); Wang Jiaxiang (王稼祥); Yang Shangkun
• 8 January 1931 new student leadership appointed in Shanghai
• Wang was elected to the Communist Party’s politburo and Bo Gu, while Zhang Wentian took up other, equally important, positions
• but “the real power faction” (Ryan) under Zhu De and Mao Zedong was quickly gaining support and power

Question 7

Jianxi - rural bases gain autonomy

Answer 7

• took six months for instructionsfrom Shanghai to reach a Soviet in Jiangxi in 1928
• local bosses could rival or overshadow the official leadership
• “It was in the villages, not the cities, that Communists were gaining strength.” Ryan

Question 8

Jianxi leadership - Li Lisan

Answer 8

• mposed draconian discipline, and insisted that the Party concentrateon urban action
• Li was replaced by Mif’s protégé, Wang Ming, and his associates in the 28 Bolsheviks took other important jobs following failed Changsha uprising

Question 9

Jianxi leadership - Mao

Answer 9

• 12 October 1932 – Mao replaced by Zhou Enlai as general political commissar of the Red Army
• ideological dispute between CCP Politburo and Mao as to role of peasants
• His treatment of colleagues was unyielding, and his pursuit ofpower relentless.
• ao presented a broad brush recipe based on peasant ferment (induced if it could not be spontaneous), armed force, guerrilla war and iconoclasm against any temple gods that stood in his way

Question 10

Jianxi land reform

Answer 10

In 1930 the soviet government ordered that surplus land be confiscated from landlords and affluent peasants, then handed to villages for redistribution.

• The process did not punish landlords or rich peasants, who like all others were entitled to ownership of land.
• Mao’s view was that declaring war on landlords ‘wasted’ revolutionary energy; he preferred a more inclusive approach that encouraged co-operation and production, rather than generating internal disruption.
• Land policies in the Chinese Soviet Republic shifted radically in 1933, when Mao’s leadership was overtaken by the Comintern-backed ’28 Bolsheviks’.
• From 1933 land policies in Jiangxi began to resemble those employed in Stalinist Russia. Land redistribution was controlled by the party centre, more closely monitored and conducted more ruthlessly. Landlords and wealthy peasants were excluded or given poor quality land; hundreds were persecuted, driven into exile or murdered. The CCP central executive condemned Mao’s land policies as too moderate and bourgeois – yet under Mao’s leadership agrarian production in Jiangxi had steadily increased.
• At its **peak in around 1932 the Jiangxi region was outdoing most other Chinese provinces in terms of food production. **