More than 80 years ago, one army of the Chinese Communist Party once shouted the slogan “Down with Mao”.
It started with the Kuomintang’s “Party purge” policy in 1927. At that time, the Kuomintang purged all the Chinese Communist Party members who had infiltrated into the party. In response to the Kuomintang’s “Party purge”, the CCP, with the instruction and help of the Communist International, launched several riots. Mao Zedong, who led the Hunan riots, established the first rural revolutionary base in Jiangxi’s Jinggang Mountains after the failure of the riots, and Mao’s status within the CCP rose. The CPC Central Committee in Shanghai then appointed Mao as the General Political Commissar and Secretary of the General Front Committee of the Red Front Army in the Soviet Union. In other words, Mao became the supreme leader of the Jiangxi Soviet, and orders from Shanghai could be carried out only through Mao.
However, Mao’s personal authority in the Jiangxi Soviet was not established as a result of his elevated status. On the one hand, when Mao combined his views with those of the central government, it inevitably aroused the discontent of some Soviet leaders and Red Army generals; on the other hand, Mao, who came from Hunan, was at odds with the native Jiangxi leaders in some respects, and Mao was challenged by the local power faction in southwest Ganxi, led by Li Wenlin.
Mao advocated the “confiscation of all land”, while the southwest Gangsinan faction advocated the implementation of the decision made at the Sixth Communist Party Congress on “confiscating the land of the gentry and landlords”; secondly, the distribution of power. Mao proposed to merge the two special committees in Ganxi and Xiang-Gan border to form the new Ganxi Special Committee. Later Mao appointed his cronies Liu Shiqi and Zeng Shan to form the Ganxi Special Committee as the highest body to lead Ganxi Southwest. In addition Mao also merged the Second and Fourth Red Army Corps led by Li Wenlin into Peng Dehuai’s division to form the Sixth Red Army, but these decisions were resisted by the southwest Ganxi side, which believed that these decisions had to be approved by the CPC Central Committee and the Jiangxi Provincial Committee before they could take effect.
Faced with the challenge, how to establish his authority became an urgent problem for Mao, and Mao adopted the extreme terror of physical annihilation, an inauguration that broke through the traditions and ethics of the CCP’s past. For this reason Mao found an excuse, saying that the Party and the Red Army in southwest Ganxi had been controlled by opportunism and the rich peasant line, and in order to save the revolution, they had to be thoroughly cleansed.
Purge the AB group elements
Thus, on the pretext that there were people from the AB group within the Red Army, Mao began to purge those leaders who were at odds with him. The “AB League”, Anti-Bolshevik, meaning “anti-Bolshevik”, was a Kuomintang rightist organization established in Jiangxi in January 1927 during the Northern Expeditionary War, with the aim of fighting the Communist Party and the Kuomintang leftists. It was disbanded three months after its establishment and was not reestablished later.
Mao, on the other hand, began a massive two-year purge in 1930 on the pretext of clearing the Red Army of hidden AB elements, killing a large number of innocent generals.
The Ganxi Special Committee led by Liu Shiqi was the first to take advantage of Zhu Jiahao, a member of the issuing section of the regimental special committee, who fabricated a group of “AB league elements” under torture to extract confessions. Then the Special Committee of Southwest Gan issued an urgent circular to mobilize party members and the masses to thoroughly purge the AB group, and encouraged the “AB group members” to be “killed without amnesty. “The leaders should of course be executed by extraordinary means, but care must be taken that they are killed by the masses in mass meetings. …… rich peasants, petty bourgeoisie and above, and hooligans and landlubbers of the AB group to kill without amnesty. …… workers and peasants who join the AB group have a historical status, and the ability to be more active kill without amnesty.”
And Mao had already launched a purge of the Red Front Army (Red Army Corps I and III) under his leadership before the purge of the leaders of southwest Gansu, arresting and killing a number of disgruntled commanders and some party members of wealthy origin, such as He Ducai, who supported Zhu in the Zhu-Mao struggle, was killed. In less than a month, more than 4,400 “AB group members” were caught in the 40,000-strong Red Army. According to Zhang Rong in his book “Mao: The Little Known Story”, as many as 10,000 Red Army members were killed, accounting for a quarter of the Red Army in Jiangxi.
Soon after attending the National Conference of Soviet Regional Representatives chaired by Li Lisan, Li Wenlin, who had returned to Jiangxi from Shanghai, chaired the second plenary session of the Southwest Ganxi Special Committee. At the meeting, Li not only accused Mao, but also withdrew Liu Shiqi’s position as secretary of the Special Committee. Enraged, Mao soon had Li Wenlin and others arrested and had his crony Zeng Shan replace Li Wenlin to lead the reorganized Jiangxi Provincial Executive Committee.
Futian Incident
In November 1930, the Kuomintang launched a siege against the Soviet Union. Mao led the army to fight against the Kuomintang, but gave the purge of Futian, the headquarters of the Jiangxi Soviet Government, to Li Shaojiu, the secretary-general of the General Political Department of the Red Army and the director of the purge committee, who demanded that “all counties and districts should catch the rich peasant waverers and kill them in large numbers”, and that “if the party and government in the area are not caught and killed, then the person in charge of that area can be arrested and put on trial.
Within a few days, more than 120 people were arrested from the 20th Red Army and the local Soviet Special Committee and Action Committee in Futian, including Duan Liangbi, Li Baifang, Jin Wanbang (Minister of Military Affairs of the Provincial Soviet Government), Zhou Coron (Minister of Finance of the Provincial Soviet Government), Xie Hanchang (Director of the Political Department of the 20th Red Army), Liu Wanqing, Ren Xinda, Ma Ming, and other key leaders of the Provincial Executive Committee and the 20th Red Army. Li Shaojiu tortured these people, and some of them were tortured to death on the spot.
The wives of these men were also arrested as members of the “AB Group” and tortured by “beating them with the ground, burning their bodies with incense, burning their pussies, and cutting their breasts with a knife”.
On December 12, the 1st Battalion of the 174th Regiment of the 20th Red Army, led by its commander Liu En, staged a mutiny and captured the county town of Futian, releasing all the arrested people and arresting all the local government officials, including Li Shaojiu. This was the “Futian Incident”, or the “Futian Incident”.
That night, the leaders of the Incident held an emergency meeting and concluded that Li Shaojiu’s actions were directed by Mao Zedong. The following day, the soldiers of the 20th Army held a general meeting in Futian Square, where the arrested men told what had happened and showed their wounds. The angry soldiers shouted the slogan “Down with Mao, support Zhu (De), Peng (Dehuai) and Huang (Gonglou)”.
At the critical moment, Peng Dehuai, who was holding a lot of troops, sided with Mao, and Mao’s shaken position was consolidated. In order to defend himself, Mao wrote a letter of reply from the General Front Committee, arguing that he was the embodiment of the Red Army and the Party, and that to oppose himself was counter-revolutionary and an “AB group”.
Although the leaders of the Incident later admitted their mistakes to the CPC Central Committee, and Xiang Ying, the acting secretary of the Soviet Central Bureau of the CPC at that time, also said that the solution would be through education and meetings, but the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee made a “Resolution on the Futian Incident” on the 28th of 1931, clearly supporting Mao Zedong and qualifying the “Futian Incident” as a “counter-revolutionary riot led by the AB Group”, and at the same time removing Xiang Ying as the acting secretary and replacing him with Mao.
The result was easy to imagine. About 700 to 800 officers of the 20th Army, including Liu Enemy, and the leaders of the former Jiangxi Provincial Committee were killed one after another. Since ammunition was in short supply, most of them were either killed by knives, sticks, or buried alive. Subsequently, the number of the 20th Army was withdrawn and the remaining soldiers were incorporated into other armies.
After the Futian Incident, the campaign against the AB regiment was taken to a new level. In just two or three years, the Communist Party executed more than 70,000 soldiers designated as AB regiment, more than 20,000 so-called “reorganizationists” and more than 6,200 so-called “social democrats”, totaling 100,000 people. A total of 100,000 people were killed. Mao also used this to consolidate his power.
Huang Kecheng, then director of the political department of the Fifth Red Army, later said of this history in his “Autobiography”: “If you count the old historical accounts, this one alone is not enough to cover the head of Huang Kecheng.”
Later history proved that the Chinese Communist Party never had such an organization as the “AB Group”, but the injustice was never cleared. The participants shouted the slogan “Down with Mao Zedong”, which is a testament to the gruesome killings back then.
The purge of the “AB” group was the beginning of the killings within the CCP. Like other communist countries in the world, the CCP not only massacred people, but also carried out bloody purges from time to time within its ranks, and its methods were extremely brutal. power. It needed to intimidate not only the people, but also its own people, in order to form an “impregnable fighting fortress. Such bloody internal purges occurred again and again in the subsequent history of the CCP.
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