Zhu De

[upbeat music] Welcome to episode 138 of the People's History of Ideas podcast.

Two episodes ago, among other things, we discussed how in January 1930, Mao Zedong and Zhu De lured the suppression force that had been sent to crush the communist insurgency away from western Fujian and into Jiangxi, and then circled around and defeated the counter-revolutionaries.

This was a classic application of their 16 character formula for waging guerrilla warfare.

Quote, "The enemy advances, we retreat.

You might remember that back in episode 116 we discussed the Xingguo land law, which the communists passed when they occupied Xingguo and some neighboring counties in southern Jiangxi before moving into western Fujian.

This initial effort at carrying out a land reform in southern Jiangxi, however, was stymied by the opposition of local communist leaders.

After the Fourth Red Army left Xingguo, these local Communist Party leaders went so far as to mobilize peasants to put up slogans denouncing Mao Zedong and Zhu De.

Now, in January 1930, this opposition within the Communist Party to carrying out a full-scale land reform was perceived by Mao Zedong and Zhu De as the primary obstacle to consolidating the Red Army's recent victory by establishing red political power across several counties in southern Jiangxi.

Revolution had its own morality.

April 1928, Zhu De arrived with a thousand soldiers from a failed uprising in Nanchang.

Zhu was everything Zedong wasn't.

Professional soldier, trained in Germany, calm where Zedong burned hot.

The empire ruled through a young woman's ears.

Nineteen seventy-six arrived with omens.

Zhou Enlai died in January, Zhu De in July.

The old revolutionaries disappearing like lights going out.

Nie became an expert in cryptography and wireless messaging, and decades later, he would become one of the founding fathers of the Chinese atomic bomb.

You also had three future marshals of the People's Liberation Army, Ye Jianying, Chen Yi, and Zhu De, all operating within this European crucible.

crucible.It creates a bond of absolute trust, a shared operational language that you can only get by surviving the pressure cooker together.

But the tragedy of this story is that when this highly trained, paranoid cadre of operatives finally returns to China in the mid-1920s, they don't get to slowly build an organization.

It really is.

He Zhihua was deeply entrenched in the party's early history.

She was the ex-wife of Zhu De, the famous communist general.

She had been part of the student worker networks in Germany.

The party ordered several uprisings in the summer and autumn of 1927, calculated to demonstrate that the communist movement had not been broken.

The most significant of these, and the one with the longest consequences for Chinese history, was the Nanchang Uprising on the first of August, led by Zhou Enlai and a military commander named Zhu De.

The Nanchang rebels held the city for a few days before being driven out by nationalist forces, then retreated south in disarray.

The date of the Nanchang Uprising, the first of August 1927, is still celebrated as the founding date of what eventually became the People's Liberation Army, which tells you something about how founding myths work.

An army that stole from farmers made enemies.

An army that paid and treated people respectfully made a supply network.

In April of 1928 Zhu De arrived at Jinggan Shan with the remnants of the Nanchang Uprising forces, several thousand men, veterans of actual combat, and far better armed than Mao's current force.

The two men merged their armies into what became known as the Fourth Red Army, with Zhu De as military commander and Mao as political commissar.