Chinese Soviet Republic

Mao was both CSR state chairman and prime minister; he commanded the state and its government. Mao's tenure as commander of a "small state within a state" gave him experience in mobile warfare and peasant organization, which helped him lead the Chinese Communists to victory in 1949.

The encirclement campaigns initiated by the Kuomintang in 1934 forced the CCP to abandon most of the soviets in southern China. The CCP (including the leadership of the CSR) embarked on the Long March from southern China to the Yan'an Soviet, where a rump CSR continued to exist. A complex series of events in 1936 culminated in the Xi'an Incident, in which Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped and forced to negotiate with the CCP. The CCP offered to abolish the CSR and put the Chinese Red Army (nominally) under Kuomintang control in exchange for autonomy and an alliance against Japan. These negotiations were successful, and eventually resulted in the creation of the Second United Front. The CSR was officially dissolved on 22 September 1937 and the Yan'an Soviet was reconstituted officially as the Shaan-Gan-Ning and Jin-Cha-Ji Border Regions.

History

Background

During the First United Front between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, the two parties embarked on the Northern Expedition in an effort to unify China with a single government. In 1927, the KMT broke the United Front with the Shanghai Massacre and violently suppressed the Communists. The Communists as well as a few army units loyal to them fled urban areas into the countryside, where they founded the Chinese Workers and Peasants' Red Army to wage civil war. A large group in southern China commanded by Mao Zedong established a base in the remote Jinggang Mountains. A Kuomintang counterinsurgency campaign forced Mao and his group to relocate once again, and they moved into the border region between Jiangxi and Fujian provinces.

Meanwhile, Communists from other areas of China followed a similar pattern of retreat into the countryside. In order to rebuild the party's strength, the 6th National Congress ordered these rural cadres to organize soviet governments. Beginning in 1929, soviets began to be created in isolated regions across the country, including rural Guangxi, the Eyuwan border area, and the Xiangegan border area. Mao's group founded the Jiangxi Soviet, which became the largest and best administered soviet thanks to the number of Communist cadres from across the country that took refuge there. Although the Central Committee of the Communist Party was still underground in Shanghai during this period, the center of political gravity had begun to shift to Mao in Jiangxi.

Establishment and growth

In 1931, the Communist Party decided to consolidate these isolated base areas into a single state, the Chinese Soviet Republic. The soviets combined into the CSR were discontiguous, but all south of the Yellow River.

In November 1931, a National Soviet People's Delegates Conference proclaimed the CSR in Ruijin, Jiangxi. Notably, communications between the far-flung soviets were so poor (due to their isolation and intense pressure from the Kuomintang) that the second-largest soviet, in Eyuwan, failed to send delegates. Instead, it held its own conference.

With Mao Zedong as both head of state (Chinese: 中央執行委員會主席; lit. 'Chairman of the Central Executive Committee') and head of government (Chinese: 人民委員會主席; lit. 'Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars'), the CSR gradually expanded. The CSR reached its peak in 1933. It governed a population which exceeded 3.4 million in an area of approximately 70,000 square kilometers (although the isolated soviets were never connected into one contiguous piece of territory).

Encirclement campaigns

The National Revolutionary Army conducted a series of campaigns against the various soviets of the CSR known as the "encirclement campaigns". The Jiangxi Soviet survived the first, second and third encirclement campaigns thanks to the use of flexible guerrilla tactics. However, after the third counter-encirclement campaign Mao was replaced by Wang Ming, a Chinese communist returning from the Soviet Union. The Chinese Red Army was commanded by a three-man committee, which included Wang Ming's associates Otto Braun (a Comintern military advisor), Bo Gu and Zhou Enlai. The CSR then began a rapid decline, due to its extreme left-wing governance and incompetent military command. The new leadership could not rid itself of Mao's influence (which continued during the fourth encirclement campaign), which temporarily protected the communists. However, due to the dominance of the new communist leadership after the fourth counter-encirclement campaign, the Red Army was nearly halved. Most of its equipment was lost during Chiang's fifth encirclement campaign; this began in 1933 and was orchestrated by Chiang's newly hired Nazi advisors who developed a strategy of building fortified blockhouses to advance the encirclement.

This was effective; in an effort to break the blockade the Red Army besieged the forts many times, suffering heavy casualties and only limited success. As a result, the CSR shrank significantly due to the Chinese Red Army's manpower and material losses.

The Long March

Since the Jiangxi Soviet could not be held, the Standing Committee appointed Bo (responsible for politics), Braun (responsible for military strategy), and Zhou (responsible for the implementation of military planning) to organize an evacuation. The Communists managed to successfully hide their intentions from the besieging Nationalist forces for long enough to execute a successful breakout. On 16 October 1934, a force of about 130,000 soldiers and civilians under Bo Gu and Otto Braun attacked the line of Kuomintang positions near Yudu. More than 86,000 troops, 11,000 administrative personnel and thousands of civilian porters actually completed the breakout; the remainder, largely wounded or ill soldiers, continued to fight a delaying action after the main force had left, and then dispersed into the countryside. After passing through three of the four blockhouse fortifications needed to escape Chiang's encirclement, the Red Army was finally intercepted by regular Nationalist troops, and suffered heavy casualties. Of the 86,000 Communists who attempted to break out of Jiangxi with the First Red Army, only 36,000 successfully escaped. Due to the low morale within the Red Army at the time, it is not possible to know what proportion of these losses were due to military casualties, and which proportion were due to desertion. The conditions of the Red Army's forced withdrawal demoralized some Communist leaders (particularly Bo Gu and Otto Braun), but Zhou remained calm and retained his command.

This retreat marked the beginning of what would become known as the Long March. During the course of the next two years, Communist forces abandoned almost all of their soviets in southern China that had made up the core of the CSR. The survivors went into hiding or followed Mao to Yan'an, where they took refuge in the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region.

Dissolution

The Chinese Soviet Republic continued to exist formally even after the Long March, since the Communists still controlled some areas such as the Hubei-Henan-Shaanxi Soviet. Bao'an was, for a time, the capital until the Communist government was moved to the Yan'an Soviet. The Chinese Soviet Republic was dissolved on 22 September 1937 when the Chinese Communist Party issued, in the Second United Front, its manifesto on unity with the Kuomintang; the Second Sino-Japanese War was only a few weeks old. The Chinese Communist Party remained in de facto control of Yan'an, which was its stronghold for the remainder of the war with Japan.