Jianxi Soviet - encirclement and purges

Question 1

1st encirclement campaign

Answer 1

December 1930 – 1st Encirclement Campaign:

30,000 soldiers in Mao-Zhu army defeat 100,000 KMT

Question 2

2nd encirclement campaign

Answer 2

March 1931 – 2nd Encirclement Campaign: 200,000 KMT

Question 3

3rd encirclement campaign

Answer 3

July 1931 – 3rd Encirclement Campaign: 300,000 KMT

Question 4

4th encirclement campaign

Answer 4

March 1933 – 4th Encirclement Campaign

Question 5

5th encirclement campaign

Answer 5

- October 1933 – 5th Encirclement Campaign begins with 400,000 KMT

• advice from Hans von Seekt,, sent by Hitler

Question 6

Otto Braun

Answer 6

Li De

• did not speak a word of Chinese, had little knowledge of China
• n the later part of 1934 Braun/Li De assumed a position of command in the early First Front Army, together with Zhou Enlai and Bo Gu – with authority to make all military decisions.

Question 7

Encirclement - KMT tactics

Answer 7

“Iron Bucket Plan”

• The plan was to build 30 blockade lines supported by 30 barbed wire fences, most of them electric, in the region 150 km around Ruijin, to starve the Communists
• the idea of blockhouses and a gradual tigheting of a siege ring around CCP areas
• 14,000 blockhouses by 1934
• He turned Mao’s guerrilla warfare on its head, forcing the Red Army to confront his troops in conventional trench warfare.

0 We will exhaust them and wipe them out

Question 8

Encirclement - CCp tactics

Answer 8

• communist guerilla tactics, though successful in the past, were ineffective by [that] time.” Ryan
• Braun blamed, portrayed as adopting positional warfare

Question 9

Futian purge - reasons

Answer 9

• October 1930 Mao wrote to party headquarters to Shanghai “The entire Party there is under the leadership of rich peasants”
• revolution wasmilder, designed not to antagonize their families, relatives and clan members
• accused of being ‘mountaintopists’, putting local concerns above wider CCP interests
• ‘it is necessary to create terror for awhile in every rural area, or otherwise it would be impossible to suppress the activities of the counter-revolutionaries in the countryside or overthrow the authority of the gentry.’ – Mao

Question 10

Futian purge - events

Answer 10

• December 1930 Li Shaojiu (Chairman of Purge Committee) arrested almost entire Jiangxi Communist Committee, 120 members
• over 20,000 dead
• Yangzi base headed by He Long
• executionof 90 per cent of the officers in one Red Army corps
• February 1932 officials were sent to villages to discover “new enemies of the people”
• first 5 months Land Investigation drive found 5,680 “new enemies” in the base and they were punished by fines, imprisonment, hard labour or death
• at peak, 13,620 landlords and rich peasants were identified in just three months

Question 11

Futian purge - outcome

Answer 11

• from the summer of 1933 hundreds of thousands of people fled
• “Shantang District has 6000 people and 2000 have gone to the White Area” country Party secretary
• some came back with advancing Nationalist troops as scouts, guides, and spies
• the Jiangxi purge marked what Mao biographer PhilipShort calls the ‘loss of innocence’.
• Killing their own had become a habit forCommunist leaders. – Fenby