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.
When he died on 6 July 1976, months before the Tangshan earthquake and the fall of the Gang of Four would together close the Maoist era, the Chinese state gave him a funeral attended by many thousands, honouring in death an authority it had been reluctant to exercise in his final years of life.
His Legacy
Zhu De's life discloses the character of the Chinese revolution, being a most successful, a peasant war led by peasants, in which military strategy and agrarian politics were inseparable, and in which the stature of the professional revolutionary soldier was tempered or levelled with the rural people from whom the Red Army drew its strength.
His death, arriving in the backdrop the collapse of an entire generation of Chinese communist leadership, marks a fitting point at which to analyse both the achievements of the peasant based revolutionary war he helped to design and on the unresolved contradictions of the state it eventually produced.
Zhu De taught us three things principally.
First, that revolutionary strength is generated from the people or it flows from nowhere. Zhu De’s military genius epitomised by the guerrilla tactics that defeated four encirclement campaigns and were studied and modelled from Vietnam to Cuba – stood as a testament that an army that served the peasants could visualise with the peasants’ eyes, while its enemies “were afraid to advance after they sighted even one barefoot peasant watching them from a distance”.
Second, that people can undergo a drastic transformation at any age. The warlord general who renounced wealth, rank and opium to start again at the bottom in his mid-thirties, standing to attention before a man ten years younger, is a standing rebuke to every cynic who says character is destiny. Zhu De underwent one of the most extraordinary transformations in history -like a man reborn.
Third, that qualities of greatness and humility can characterise the same person. Evans Carlson wrote that Zhu De combined “the kindness of a Robert E. Lee, the tenacity of a Grant, and the humility of a Lincoln”; his soldiers expressed was a peasant like themselves, and no officer dared curse or strike them while he commanded. The army’s affectionate nickname for him was “Chief of the Cooks”, earned the night he escaped assassination in a warlord coup by winning the hearts of the gunmen pointing revolvers at his head: “Don’t shoot me. I’m only the cook. Don’t shoot a man who can cook for you!”
It is ironic that his story transcended the Western world through Agnes Smedley, the legendary North American revolutionary journalist who followed his headquarters through the war years and narrated the saga of his life in The Great Road. She did not live to see it published; her ashes lie in Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, following her death in the UK in May 1950, beneath a stone bearing Zhu De’s own calligraphy – a friendship across nations that itself defines the journey or mission of both their lives.
Making a transition from a tenant’s hut on the “King of Hell’s” estate to the rostrum at Tiananmen, life reflected the Chinese revolution’s road more illustratively. Mao’s own verdict on him, quoted by Xi Jinping at the 130th anniversary of Zhu De’s birth, dose perfect justice to him: his magnanimity was as vast as the sea, his will as firm as steel.
Harsh Thakor is a freelance journalist Thanks information from Socialist and Progressive group and Friends of Socialist China in ‘The Great Road – Zhu De, fifty years on’ by Carloz Martinez
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