Zhu De played role of a Mascot
in military leadership in the Chinese Revolution standing as one of
its most outstanding characters
On 6th July 1976 Zhu De
died in Beijing at the age of 89. It was an irreparable for the
Chinese people: Zhou Enlai had died in January; Mao Zedong would
follow in September. Of the three, Zhu De is the least remembered in
the West – and yet the army he built, the People’s Liberation
Army, left the most indelible mark of everything the Chinese
Revolution has achieved, being amongst the finest specimens of it.
Thus, a few weeks ago we celebrated Zhu De’s 50th death
anniversary.
Very rare to know about any
individual who more made a testament that a revolutionary movement
cements a spiritual transformation or gives birth to a new man. Zhu
De’s journey’s contradictory dynamics that shaped his life
reflect experimentation and exploring in realms mystical. Zhu De also
made path breaking contribution to inventing tactics in a
revolutionary war, transcending regions unexplored in military art.
Origins
Zhu De was born in December 1886
into a tenant family in Yilong county, Sichuan, on an estate whose
landlord was known locally as the “King of Hell”.
His mother bore 13 children; the
last five were drowned at birth because the family could not feed
them. She herself, he recalled, “was so humble that she had no name
of her own”. The clan pooled its resources to educate a single son
who could talk back to the tax collectors – and so Zhu De, became
literate, passed through the old examination system in its dying
days, and entered the Yunnan Military Academy, where he joined Sun
Yat-sen’s revolutionary Tongmenghui (a radical secret society and
precursor to the Kuomintang) and played an active role in the 1911
Revolution and the campaigns that shattered Yuan Shikai’s attempted
monarchy.
Baptsim
into Communist Party and Red Army
By his mid-thirties Zhu De was a
general in the warlord armies of the south-west: wealthy, powerful,
and addicted to opium. The 1911 Revolution, he concluded, had been
“aborted by republican compromise with foreign imperialism”;
warlordism was a dead end, and he represented if. Thoroughly
disillusioned with the endless struggles for personal power that
passed for politics among the warlord cliques he made a dramatic
rupture. He relinquished his commands and his fortune, and did away
with his opium addiction alone – pacing the deck of a Yangtze
steamer for a month, in what Snow called “the hardest battle of his
life”, proof that “this man had more steel in his will than his
acquaintances supposed”.
Then he asked to join the infant
Communist Party. Rejected in Shanghai by then CPC General Secretary
Chen Duxiu on grounds that a former warlord general was incapable of
becoming a communist – he sailed for Europe, and in Berlin in late
1922 presented himself to a student organiser more than ten years his
junior named Zhou Enlai. His old life, he said, “had turned to
ashes beneath his feet”. He was admitted to the party he would
relentlessly serve for the remaining 54 years of his life.
Role
as Military Leader
On 1 August 1927, after Chiang
Kai-shek’s massacre of the Shanghai workers had drowned the first
united front between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party in blood,
Zhu De orchestrated the Nanchang Uprising – the date still marked
as the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. When the
uprising’s forces were demolished, it was Zhu De who binded the
fragmented forces together through a desperate winter retreat, facing
down the defeatists: “I refused to return to warlordism. I had
chosen the road of the people’s revolution and I would follow it to
the end.”
In the spring of 1928, he brought
his survivors to Jinggangshan and joined forces with Mao Zedong. From
that meeting the two men’s lives became, in Agnes Smedley’s
memorable phrase, “like the two arms of one body”; the Kuomintang
press, unable to conceive of them separately, called the Red Army the
“Chu Mao Army”.
Zhu De's life stood as a testament,
more fully perhaps than that of any other senior Chinese communist,
the trend that revolutionary leadership could germinate directly from
the peasantry rather than descend upon it from the intelligentsia or
the professional officer corps.
The script unfolded in August 1927,
when Zhu took part in the Nanchang Uprising, the armed communist
rising against the Kuomintang that marked the birth of the Chinese
Red Army. The uprising was crushed and Zhu was compelled to lead his
remaining troops on a long and perilous retreat through Fujian,
Guangdong and Hunan before finally, in the spring of 1928, joining
forces with the small guerrilla army that Mao Zedong had assembled in
the Jinggang Mountains of Jiangxi. From this meeting was forged the
partnership, celebrated among the peasantry of the base areas as that
of "Zhu Mao," in which Zhu designed the military framework
and Mao the political line, and together they built the Fourth Red
Army into a force that grew from some five thousand troops in 1929 to
two hundred thousand by 1933. It was Zhu who gave a practical design
or shape to the Maoist strategy of protracted people's war, to
convert it into a concrete military practice, evolving and designing
a doctrine of mobility, self-sufficiency and deep integration with
the rural population that stood in deliberate opposition to the
conventional, city centred warfare favoured by the Kuomintang and,
for a time, by Communist International (Comintern) advisers. His
maxim, that the army retreats when the enemy advances, harasses when
the enemy halts, attacks when the enemy tires and pursues when the
enemy retreats, distilled a revolutionary military philosophy in
which the peasant soldier and the peasant base area were not
coincidental to the struggle but manifested its very foundation. This
was guerrilla warfare designed not as a tactic of the weak but as the
organisational expression of a genuinely popular army, one that
survived successive Kuomintang encirclement campaigns against the
Jiangxi Soviet precisely because it was rooted in the countryside
rather than imposed upon it.
When the Fifth Encirclement Campaign
(of the Kuomintang's military offensives), fought conventionally and
mechanically on the advice of the Comintern agent Otto Braun, ended
in disaster, it was Zhu who at this most critical juncture
resurrected the forces and organised the breakout that unfolded into
the Long March, and who served as commander in chief through the
entire six-thousand-mile retreat to Shaanxi. On the Long March he
marched a distance farther than anyone, spending an extra year in the
Tibetan borderlands – and profusely refusing and countering the
disastrous ‘southern retreat’ tactic advanced by Zhang Guotao, a
founding member of the party who later abandoned the revolution: “We
had not made the Long March in order to stick in the high
Tibetan–Chinese borderland while the Japanese continued lopping off
province after province.”
As commander-in-chief of the Eighth
Route Army, he orchestrated the resistance behind Japanese lines,
launching the Hundred Regiments Offensive in 1940 – and ordering,
rebelling against all norms of that brutal war, that Japanese
prisoners be treated humanely, as “the sons and brothers of the
toiling Japanese masses”. This characterised the strategy of an
army waging a distinct type of war, that could distinguish the
enemy’s conscripts from the enemy’s rulers.
In August 1945, when Chiang Kai-shek
ordered the liberated areas’ armies to halt so that the Kuomintang
could reap the victory, Zhu De’s reply entered history: “We
consider that you have given us a mistaken order. We are compelled to
firmly refuse the order.” Four years later he stood beside Mao on
the Tiananmen rostrum as commander-in-chief of the PLA at the
proclamation of the People’s Republic. In 1955 he was named first
among the ten marshals; from 1959 until his death he served as
Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s
Congress – serving the people without seeking the slightest
personal gain, until the end.
Snow’s verdict was unequivocal:
“For pure military strategy and tactical handling of a great army
in retreat nothing has been seen in China to compare with Chu Teh’s
splendid generalship of the Long March.”
He would go on to command the Eighth
Route Army against the Japanese occupation from 1937, and then the
People's Liberation Army (PLA) through the civil war that brought the
Chinese revolution to victory in 1949.
The commander-in-chief spun, wove,
planted vegetables and carried supplies like any soldier,
characterising the nature of the red army. “Chu Teh’s devotion to
his men was proverbial”, Snow recorded in Red Star Over
China: he “lived and dressed like the rank and file, had shared
all their hardships, often going without shoes in the early days,
living one whole winter on squash, another on yak meat, never
complaining”. Corporal punishment – which Zhu De waged a bitter
struggle against as a cadet – was abolished; officers and men ate
the same food; after every battle, conferences were held at which any
fighter could subject any commander to criticism, Zhu De included.
A comrade who knew him in his Berlin
years told Snow that “he always invited criticism; he had an
insatiable appetite for criticism”.
Post-Revolution
Life
It was hallmark of the humility of
Zhu's political character that his influence receded steadily after
the founding of the People's Republic of China, as younger and more
overtly political men took the reins of state, and by 1959 he had
relinquished formal leadership of the PLA altogether, settling into
the largely ceremonial chairmanship of the Standing Committee of the
National People's Congress. He accepted this demotion without evident
bitterness, and his defence of Peng Dehuai (a Chinese communist
marshal and military leader who commanded Chinese forces in the
Korean War) at the Lushan Conference in 1959, at a critical moment,
symbolised his independence of judgement that never was influenced by
personal ambition. It is most admirable too that he never drew his
full marshal's salary, regarding it as wasteful of resources that
belonged to the people, a small characterising a life that never
buckled to the lure of personal accumulation even as the man who
risen from nothing occupied the summit of state power.
