Futian incident

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The Futian incident occurred in 1930 in the Chinese Communist Party- held Jiangxi Soviet . It was caused by internal party struggles, conflicts between the party and the population, and pressure from the Kuomintang , which pushed for the conquest of the CCP-held area. More than 1,000 communists fell victim to the political cleansing . At the height of the incident, numerous local party officials were arrested, tortured and in some cases executed in the town of Futian .

prehistory

By 1927, the Communist Party and the Kuomintang had fought on the First United Front against the warlords. The united front had been fragile for a long time when Chiang Kai-shek had a large number of Communist Party members killed with the Shanghai massacre in 1927 . Even after that, the Communist Party was harassed ( white terror ).

In addition, the CP had grown, which made it more difficult to enforce the party line. Some local party bodies were less oriented towards the specifications of the party than towards the interests of the local members. From the point of view of the party headquarters, the new functionaries in the recently liberated areas were not treating the old rulers hard enough and avoided the real break. It was agreed that the class enemies (landlords and tyrants in the villages) should be killed, but it became increasingly difficult to tell enemies and friends apart.

In February 1930, a conference of the extended front committee took place in Pitou near Donggu , in which the front committee of the 4th Corps of the Red Army , the special committee for West Jiangxi and the army committee of the 5th and 6th Corps of the Red Army took part. The delegates discussed, among other things, the Li Lisan line, according to which the Soviet should intensify attacks on large cities. A land distribution law was also passed, an issue that was also controversial within the Communist Party. The Jiangxi Province communists protested the law. They demanded that no land be confiscated from farmers, only land from landlords. They also wanted to distribute the land based on the number of workers in the household, not the number of household members. For Mao, these demands were a clear sign of deviating from the law and that the party had been infiltrated by landlords and large farmers. They contradicted not only his line, but also the deculakization as enforced in the Soviet Union. So it was determined that these forces had to be eliminated and the party Bolsheviks again. This was the beginning of a red terror that began to rage within the CP.

In response, Mao placed two officials from Hunan in the 6th Corps of the Red Army : Liu Shiqi became secretary of the party committee and political commissioner, Mao Zetan took over the position of head of the corps' political department. The reason for this was that the 6th Corps consisted primarily of soldiers who had been resident in Jiangxi for a long time and who were opposed to land reform. Mao saw the need to put these people under more control, he didn't trust them. The Hakka who immigrated relatively recently and settled in southern Jiangxi, however, welcomed a land reform. At the conference, immigrants and representatives from other provinces were in the majority, the law was passed, and the agrarian revolution in central and western Jiangxi was partly enforced by force.

In addition, Chiang Kaishek tried since 1925 to smuggle provocateurs and spies into the Communist Party. For this purpose he had created a secret so-called Anti-Bolshevik Corps ( AB Corps ). In parallel to the internal struggles over land reform, Kuomintang troops tried to destroy the Jiangxi Soviet. In October 1930, 100,000 soldiers were ready for this. The Soviet was in immediate danger and spies urgently needed to be exposed. The Jiangxi Soviet now suspected each other of spying for the AB Corps. Arrests and executions of people suspected of espionage began. More than 1,000 members of the party had fallen victim to the purges by October 1930, and every 30th party member in Jiangxi was killed.

Course of the incident

In early December, the First Army Group was fighting the outnumbered Kuomintang troops. On December 7, 1930, a group of soldiers under the command of Li Shaojiu came to Futian to arrest communists who were alleged to have had contacts with the AB Corps. Among the suspects was the head of the political department of the 20th Army Corps of the Red Army. All those arrested were under torture, so Li Shaojiu believed he had uncovered a huge conspiracy: the entire Jiangxi Party Committee, the Jiangxi Communist Youth League Committee and the leaders of the Jiangxi Soviet Government were accused by those arrested, members of the AB Corps. In Mao Zedong's personal file, which was kept in Moscow, there is a report on the bestial torture methods. As a result, Li Shaojiu arrested all delegates who had come to an urgent party conference to be held on December 8th in Futian. A total of 120 men were locked in bamboo cages and put on public display.

The arrests continued in neighboring Donggu , but a battalion commander and political cadre of the 20th Army Corps named Liu Di rebelled and attacked Futian on December 12 with 400 men. He captured the building where the prisoners were being held and released them. 100 guards were killed in the fighting.

Harsh accusations against Mao Zedong were made at the party conference held elsewhere afterwards . He was suspected of being a right-wing opportunist, of pursuing shameless goals and of wanting to destroy the party. Mao saw these allegations as a counterrevolutionary rebellion and got other high-ranking officials such as Zhu De , Peng Dehuai and Huang Gonglüe to agree with him. A report describing the events in this sense was sent to the headquarters in Shanghai with a sum of approximately 60,000 Mexican dollars , with Liu Shiqi selected as the messenger. The Politburo and Comintern representative Pawel Mif sided with Mao.

aftermath

Party headquarters selected 32-year-old textile worker Xiang Ying to investigate the incident. He had only been in the Soviet since October 1930 and did not have the necessary authority to fulfill his functions. He came to the conclusion that both parties to the dispute should be punished. In April 1931, the Shanghai Central Committee dispatched two representatives to investigate the incident, this time Politburo member Ren Bishi and Sun Yat-sen University graduate Wang Jiaxiang . This time the investigations led to a strong condemnation of the rebels.

Liu Di was sentenced to death in April 1931 by a military tribunal chaired by Zhu De . Li Shaojiu was put under party supervision for six months for going too far . The political purges didn't end until early 1932.

The Kuomintang attack - it was the first of five attempts to destroy the Soviet - was repulsed and the communists captured numerous weapons from the Kuomintang troops. A KMT division commander named Zhang Huizan was captured and executed. It is possible that the Communist Party would have dropped Mao Zedong if the Red Army had not been attacked by Kuomintang forces. However, by successfully repelling the attack, Mao had made himself unassailable.

For Mao it was the strongest internal party resistance since he addressed the issue of land distribution. It was also the first bloody confrontation between rival political camps within the CP. The incident showed that the Communist Party's policy of winning over residents by promising land reform only worked under certain conditions. Where landlords had their fields worked by agricultural workers who later immigrated, the policy of redistributing the land was welcomed by the majority of the population. The Communist Party encountered resistance where peasants worked their own fields.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer : Mao Zedong: "There will be battle": a biography . Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-95757-365-0 , pp. 157 .
  2. ^ A b Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer: Mao Zedong: "There will be a fight": a biography . Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-95757-365-0 , pp. 158 .
  3. ↑ a b Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine: Mao: The Real Story . Simon & Schuster, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4516-5447-9 , pp. 239 .
  4. ↑ Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine: Mao: The Real Story . Simon & Schuster, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4516-5447-9 , pp. 240 .
  5. ↑ a b c Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine: Mao: The Real Story . Simon & Schuster, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4516-5447-9 , pp. 241 .
  6. ↑ Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer: Mao Zedong: "There will be battle": a biography . Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-95757-365-0 , pp. 159 .
  7. ↑ Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine: Mao: The Real Story . Simon & Schuster, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4516-5447-9 , pp. 242 .
  8. ↑ Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine: Mao: The Real Story . Simon & Schuster, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4516-5447-9 , pp. 243 f .
  9. ↑ a b Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine: Mao: The Real Story . Simon & Schuster, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4516-5447-9 , pp. 244 .
  10. ^ A b Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer: Mao Zedong: "There will be a fight": a biography . Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-95757-365-0 , pp. 160 .
  11. ↑ Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine: Mao: The Real Story . Simon & Schuster, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4516-5447-9 , pp. 246 .