In late April this year, Xi Jinping went to Guangxi. When he visited the Red Army Xiangjiang Battle Memorial Park, Xinhua News Agency released that he said, “If the difficulties are big, think of the Long March of the Red Army and the bloody battle of Xiangjiang River.”
Visiting the revolutionary shrine is a way for the Communist Party leader to show that he is an orthodox heir, but the Red Army Xiangjiang Battle Memorial Park in Quanzhou, Guangxi, is the place where the Red Army suffered a tragic defeat. It is inevitable that many speculations will arise as to what nuanced meaning Xi Jinping wants to express here.
To do so, we have to understand the historical background of the Xiangjiang River battle. This is the event of late November 1934, in a nutshell: in mid-October of that year, the Red Army started the so-called “Long March” in mid-October because of the failure of the fifth anti-encirclement, and after breaking through three consecutive blockades of the national army from the south of Jiangxi, it reached the fourth blockade, which is the Xiangjiang River on the border of Hunan and Guangxi. upstream. The Red Army lost more than half of its forces before it was able to pass, with 35,000 of its alleged army of nearly 100,000 remaining.
At the beginning of the Fifth Anti-Surge and the Long March, the Red Army was commanded by a German officer, Li De (Huafu), a military advisor to the Communist International sent by the Soviet Union. He studied Western military theory and was unfamiliar with Chinese conditions, which caused discontent among the Red Army. Therefore, when the “Supreme Three”, Bo Gu, Zhou Enlai and Li De, decided at the Hunan Passage meeting to continue advancing to the western part of Hunan to meet with He Long’s Second Red Army, Mao Zedong objected to advancing towards areas where the enemy had already laid down heavy forces, but should advance to Guizhou, where the enemy was weakly defended. In the first and middle of January 1935, an enlarged meeting of the Politburo was held in Zunyi, Guizhou, to liquidate the left-leaning military line, and Mao and Zhou Enlai took command of the military instead.
After the CPC Central Committee moved into the Central Soviet Area in 1933, Mao was gradually sidelined and lost his military command and pretended to be sick. During the Red Army’s Long March, he was carried on a stretcher by junior soldiers. Wang Jiaxiang, the director of the Red Army’s Political Department, was also carried on a stretcher because he was wounded, and the two were often delusional about the Central Committee and engaged in sectarian activities as accused by Li De. Wang Jiaxiang, along with General Secretary Bogo, Wang Ming, the representative to the Communist International, and Zhang Wentian, another high ranking member of the CCP, were all internationalists. Wang Jiaxiang was responsible for convincing Zhang Wentian, so they lashed out together at the Zunyi Conference, and also gained the support of Zhou Enlai and other generals. As a result, both Bogu and Li De surrendered the leadership of the Central Secretariat and the military. After Mao Zedong took control of the military leadership, it was only in Yan’an that he again used the rectification to liquidate Wang Ming’s left-leaning political line and unify the party, becoming the real Chairman Mao.
It can be said that without the lessons of the bloody battle of Xiangjiang River there would have been no Zunyi Conference and no subsequent unification of the CCP. Therefore, Xi Jinping compared the current situation of the CCP to the battle of Xiangjiang River, and he is the left-leaning line represented by Bogu and Li De. Is he letting it slip that Beijing will also convene a new-era Zunyi Conference to remove him as General Secretary and Chairman of the Central Military Commission and liquidate his left-leaning and blind line? No wonder he is so distracted.
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