During the late Qing and Republican period, there was a very famous intellectual in Hunan named Ye De-hui (1864-1927). At that time, the Japanese were very popular in China, and when they came to Hunan, there were three people they had to meet: Wang looyun, Wang Xianqian, and Ye Dehui, which showed how famous his talent was in the area.
Ye Dehui was a jinshi during the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty in China, and there were many modern Chinese celebrities on the same list, such as Cai Yuanpei, Zhang Yuanji, Zhao Xi, Zhao Qilin, Jiang Tingfu, and so on. After winning the jinshi, Ye Dehui, after two years as the head of the Ministry of Revenue, took a leave of absence, and since then no longer as an official, but turned to business.
However, Ye Dehui did not go into business for pure commercial profit, but so that he could better concentrate on his studies and not get tired of it. In terms of scholarship, he was the best of his generation in terms of edition and cataloguing, and his “Shu Lin Qing Yan”, “Shu Lin Yu Yan”, “Guan Gu Tang bibliography”, and “Zhan Yuan reading journal” have become the classics of today’s scholarly forest. In addition, he was also happy to engrave books and was good at engraving books, and once praised himself for “having his writings read throughout the world,” which is not a lie.
Politically, Ye Dehui was very conservative and opposed the Reform Movement, and he was the chairman of the Preparedness Society of Hunan before Yuan Shikai became emperor. Even so, if Ye had been careful with his words and actions, he might have been able to save himself in those turbulent and changing times. In the words of his fellow countryman, Hu Naian, he spoke freely and unreservedly whenever he felt like it, and he did not care about the occasion or who he was speaking to. “Bold”. This naturally got him into a lot of trouble, the last of which killed him.
It started with the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party.
Shell Development
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in 1921, there were many Chinese who believed in the Three Principles of the People and the Kuomintang, but few who believed in communism or the CCP. The Soviet Communist Party (Soviet Union) had the task of establishing a communist regime in China, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had to grow in a short period of time. Based on its own experience of “betrayal and seizure of power,” the Soviet Communist Party instructed the CCP to join the KMT and “use the body of the KMT to develop its own organization.
After joining the KMT as an individual, the CPC members, instead of following Sun Yat-sen’s demand that they should obey discipline and refrain from openly criticizing the KMT, developed themselves and gained leadership of the KMT’s propaganda and organizational departments as well as the Whampoa Military Academy, and at the same time created a division between leftists and rightists within the KMT, i.e., “pro-Russian and pro-communist” and “anti-Russian and anti-Communist”, and began a struggle against the rightists, calling those KMT members who were not pro-Russian and pro-communist “counter-revolutionaries” until they were expelled from the party.
In January 1926, the “Second National Congress” of the KMT was held, and the CCP’s plan to seize power was fully realized at this meeting. More than one-third of the KMT Central Standing Committee, Central Executive Committee, and Central Committee members were Communists and the leaders of the KMT’s pro-Russian and pro-Communist “leftists” respectively, with the remaining one-third considered to be Centrists and Chiang Kai-shek under Tan Ping-shan, a member of the Communist Party. Among the ministers of the KMT Central Committee, CPC members made up the majority.
As a result, the “Second National Congress” of the KMT was actually turned into the “Second National Congress” of the Communist Party, and almost all the important leadership positions in the KMT Central Committee were occupied by the Communist Party. The Kuomintang (KMT) established its own party headquarters, which was held by the Communist Party. By this time, Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People had been ignored. Likewise, Chiang Kai-shek’s proposal for a northern expedition at the Second National Congress of the KMT was opposed by all Soviet advisors and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which distributed leaflets and posted banners in Guangzhou City, openly opposing the KMT’s northern expedition. “.
The Red Terror and the Death of Dehui Ye
The encroachment of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the KMT aroused the discontent of insightful people in the KMT, including Chiang Kai-shek. In order to limit the CCP’s expansion within the KMT, Chiang Kai-shek took advantage of the “Zhongshan Ship Incident” in late March to organize the Party’s affairs, take back some of its power, and decide on the Northern Expedition.
While the Northern Expedition was winning victories, on the one hand, the Soviet Union and the CPC took advantage of the fact that the Nationalist government in Guangzhou had moved to Wuhan and Chiang Kai-shek was stationed in Nanchang to direct a coup d’état jointly staged by the pro-Russian and pro-Communist factions of the CPC and the KMT, removing Chiang Kai-shek as chairman of the Central Military Commission and regaining the leadership of the KMT.
On the other hand, a peasant movement and agrarian revolution were staged in the Northern Expedition area, with the aim of creating the basis for launching the Chinese Communist Revolution by inciting the peasants to revolt and obstructing the Northern Expedition. The Red Terror emerged most harshly in Hunan and Hubei provinces.
For example, the Hunan peasants’ associations at all levels established by Mao Zedong, which claimed to have 5.18 million members, not only acted like governments at all levels, with power and guns, but also set up their own public halls and prisons, criticized struggles at every turn, and arrested and killed at will. The father of Chinese Communist leader Li Lisan was executed by the Peasants’ Association, and many middle and lower ranking Hunan officers and soldiers of the Northern Expeditionary Army who came from small landowners, and whose family members were unable to escape, were also condemned, struggled, imprisoned, or arrested and killed, and had their property confiscated.
When Xiong Zhen-zai, a KMT soldier who was very leftist during the garrison of Changsha, arrived in Chenzhou, he was furious when he heard that his father-in-law had been arrested and was traveling to his hometown, and became extremely anti-communist. Tan Yankai, a KMT patriarch and communist sympathizer, had to send a telegram to the Communist Party because his son-in-law, the grandson of a capitalist in Changsha, was being blackmailed by the Agricultural Society.
In addition, the home of He Jian, the KMT commander of the 35th Army who killed Yang Kaihui and staged the “April 12” coup, was raided, and his father was paraded through the streets. What shocked the KMT the most was the murder of Ye Dehui in Hunan.
But according to the memoirs of Xu Kexiang, who later staged the “Ma Ri Incident,” Ye Dehui said to the Communist Party cadres guarding him before his execution, “I have a pair of couplets for you: “The agricultural luck is great, and the rice, beans, wheat, and millet are great. General mongrel; the venue expanded, horses, cows, sheep, chickens, dogs and boars, six herds of animals.” “Bastard” and “beast” are the most popular curses in Changsha. This pair of couplets is an extremely spiteful insult to the Communist Party.
According to Xu Kexiang, Ye Dehui wrote the couplet after his arrest, and was not killed by the couplet. According to his “crime report,” Ye was arrested by the Provincial Agricultural Self-Defense Army because he was an old acquaintance of Wuhan’s Nationalist Government, and because He Jian, who killed Yang Kaihui, had been one of his disciples. As a result, he was publicly executed by the Communist Party of China on the charge of being “the leader of the remaining evil feudal gentry”.
Ye Shanong, son of Ye Dehui, once described how his father was “shot twice, once in the head and once in the center,” and how “the whole family fled for fear of being arrested, and his wife and family were scattered, terrified. All of the family’s books, as well as gold, stones, paintings, bronzes, manuscripts, applied gold, silver, jewels and jades, clothes and utensils were looted by them. Only a few books, inscriptions, and bookplates remained in the house, which were used for the Zhongshan Library.
Ye Dehui’s death led to a number of Hunan gentry joining the anti-communist movement.
In Wuhan, the CCP-initiated Wuhan labor movement not only went on strike at will, demanding wage increases at will, but also formed their own courts and prisons, arrested and tortured people at will, inspected trains and ships at will, cut off traffic at will, and confiscated the allocation of factories and stores at will. …… In the two months after the Northern Expeditionary Army occupied Wuhan, workers and shopkeepers went on strike thirty-six times. …… The frequent strikes not only exacerbated labor disputes, but also created difficulties for the Wuhan National Government.
The Ma-Ji Incident
The tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party not only made the resolutely anti-communist Kuomintang, but also those once confused Kuomintang and warlords awake to the danger of communism, so they chose the path of separation and anti-communism. For example, Feng Yuxiang, who was once pro-communist and close to Russia and had the benefit of Soviet Russia, made the statement that Soviet Russia and the Chinese Communist Party were “impersonating the name of the National Revolution and spreading the poison of fear throughout the country”, and chose to “send the Communists far from Russia”.
On April 12, 1927, Chiang Kai-shek officially ordered the purge of the Party, and on May 21, KMT officer Xu Kexiang, who was stationed in Wuhan, led an army attack on the Provincial Federation of Trade Unions and other CCP institutions and groups, disbanded the workers’ pickets and released all the detained gentry, and killed more than a hundred CCP members and rioters. The telegram of the 21st was called the “Ma-Ji Incident” because it rhymed with the word “Ma” on behalf of Japan.
In early 1928, Xia Ming-Han was arrested by the Gui warlord and then executed.
“After the Ma-Ji Incident, Chen Duxiu, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, called the Comintern in June and admitted that the Hunan peasant movement had overreacted and caused the incident. In his message, he said, “These excesses have forced the soldiers, who came from a background of small landlords and gentry bandits, to form a united front against the Communists and the peasants. This is especially painful for those soldiers whose families have been oppressed.” Qu Qiubai, who had been general secretary of the Communist Party, also accused the peasant movement of encroaching on the estates of revolutionary officers.
The death of Ye Dehui, a leading intellectual, and other ordinary citizens opened the door to the killing of intellectuals and the killing of intellectuals by the CCP. The CCP embarked on an even bloodier path.
Recent Comments