The outstanding achievements made by Chairman Mao, the founding leader of our country, for the revolutionary cause are respected by all levels of the country. In particular, the officers and fighters who marched and fought with Chairman Mao greatly admired his military ability, but Chairman Mao was not recognized by the whole army from the beginning.
During the Jinggangshan period, many people felt that some of Chairman Mao's practices were not in accordance with the rules, including Zhu De and Chen Yi. Zhu and Chen had huge differences with Chairman Mao over army building, and they opposed Chairman Mao's proposals on several occasions.
In 1927, Chairman Mao saw that the urban roads were not feasible, so he decided to first establish a rural revolutionary base area in Jinggangshan, which had a certain mass base, and thus effectively improved the logistics equipment of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army.
At the same time, a group of people and horses departing from Nanchang were speeding towards Jinggangshan.
In April 1928, the Nanchang rebel army led by Zhu De and Chen Yi successfully launched the Shonan Rebellion, which was fiercely pursued by the enemy. In order to preserve the strength of the rebel army, they had to lead the army to retreat to Jinggangshan.
Chairman Mao sent the second regiment led by Yuan Wencai to march west to meet the Xiangnan peasant army, while he himself took the first regiment to block the pursuing forces of the Kuomintang and cover Zhu De's successful retreat.
After discussion, it was decided to merge the two armies into the Fourth Army of the Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army (later renamed the Fourth Army of the Red Army), with Zhu De as its commander, Chairman Mao as the secretary of the Central Military Commission, and Chen Yi as the leader of the teaching brigade.
The combined Red Army had six regiments, the main force of which was the Twenty-eighth Regiment, composed of the remnants of the Nanchang Rebel Army, and the Thirty-first Regiment, formed on the basis of the autumn harvest uprising troops on the border of Xianggan and Gansu.
The combat effectiveness of the Red Army on JinggangShan was greatly strengthened, but because Zhu De and Chen Yi were from the military background, and Chairman Mao was a scholar, their identities, experiences, thoughts, and visions were different, resulting in unavoidable differences in their cooperation.
The biggest point of disagreement between the three of them was whether to insist on centralization or decentralization in army building, and the two sides had different opinions on this issue, and the stalemate could not be reached, and later, zhu De and Chen Yi clearly expressed their opposition to Chairman Mao's ideas.
Chairman Mao has always insisted that the party has absolute leadership and that democratic centralism is practiced in the army, which is manifested as "from top to bottom," that is, the army must "obey the party's command."
At that time, Chairman Mao was also the secretary of the former party committee of Hunan Province and the secretary of the Xianggan Border Special Committee, and the secretary of the Military Commission of the Fourth Red Army was Chen Yi, because both the special committee and the Central Military Commission had to obey the orders of the former committee. Therefore, the decision-making power of the Red Fourth Army is actually in the hands of Chairman Mao.
Zhu De, Chen Yi, and others believed that the army was "led by one person" by Chairman Mao and lacked democracy, coupled with the fact that Chairman Mao was young and vigorous at that time, and under the condition of putting the overall situation first, he would sometimes suppress other people's disputes many times in order to uphold his own ideas, which also aggravated the contradictions between Mao, Zhu, and Chen.
Zhu De and Chen Yi were pondering the issue of decentralization and arguing that inner-party democracy should be "bottom-up", a difference that sparked heated discussions between Zhu and Mao in January 1929.
At that time, Chiang Kai-shek gathered nearly 30,000 troops in Xianggan and Gansu provinces and prepared to launch an attack on Jinggangshan. Chairman Mao, Chen Yi, and Zhu De led the Red Fourth Army to set out in the direction of Gannan to break the enemy's blockade.
It was a cold winter, and when our army was ambushing and fighting in the mountains, it was faced with the practical problems of thin clothing and food shortages, and there were no party organizations along the way, and the troops encountered many troubles.
Some people suggested that the former committee should be divided into units, and Chairman Mao and Zhu De argued about this, but they never came up with a result that could convince both sides. Considering that the dispersal activities were very likely to be broken by the enemy one by one, Chairman Mao put this proposal on hold for the time being.
It was not until the troops entered the Luofushan Mountains, which border the three provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, and Gansu, that they held a meeting here and decided to suspend the administrative functions of the Military Commission of the Fourth Red Army and change it to the Military Political Department, with Chairman Mao concurrently serving as the director of the department, mainly responsible for the army's political and ideological work, mass work, and the collection of funds, and the party committees at all levels within the army were directly under the leadership of the former committee.
Chairman Mao, who held several positions, summed up almost all the rights of the army, and Zhu De and Chen Yi already had opinions on the excessive concentration of power, so that they were even more convinced that Chairman Mao's style in the army belonged to the "patriarchal system."
What's more, at this time, the environment faced by the army was very harsh, and it was necessary to survive the severe cold and endure mosquito bites, which seriously intensified the contradictions, and everyone began to directly move the points of disagreement to the table for discussion.
As soon as the contradictions erupted, Zhu De ushered in an opportunity to turn his vision of the army into reality. Chairman Mao led the Red Fourth Army on the way to western Fujian, learned the news of Chiang Kai-shek's break with the Gui warlords, and after some consideration, discussed and decided to carry out guerrilla warfare between western Fujian and southern Fujian.
In order to adapt to the current war situation, Chairman Mao reorganized the army again, and Zhu De proposed at this time that he wanted to restore the "Military Commission of the Fourth Red Army."
At this time, Liu Angong, who had just returned from studying in the Soviet Union, was sent by the CPC Central Committee to the Red Fourth Army, and he and Zhu De were fellow countrymen, and the two were relatively close in military ideology, so he was on Zhu De's side on the matter of whether to restore the Central Military Commission.
Despite Chairman Mao's resolute opposition, the proposal was adopted, and the Provisional Military Commission was re-established within the New Fourth Army, with Liu Angong as secretary of the Provisional Military Commission and director of the Military Political Department.
Liu Angong
After taking office, Liu Angong began to arbitrarily express opposition to Chairman Mao's original political ideas. He wanted to emulate the Soviet Union and use the Provisional Military Commission to restrict the front committee, and he was even more deliberate in order to change the central military commission from temporary to formal, so that the front committee would lose its decision-making power.
In order to solve the problem of whether to establish a Central Military Commission, the Red Fourth Army held a special meeting of the former committee at the end of May of that year.
Not surprisingly, a heated debate erupted at the meeting.
The side represented by Zhu De and Chen Yi believed that since the army was called the Red Fourth Army, there must be a special Central Military Commission, and accused the former committee of managing too much. Chairman Mao's side, on the other hand, felt that the direct leadership of the army by the former committee was more conducive to the actual combat situation in which the troops frequently changed battles.
Chairman Mao saw that the crowd was very agitated and quarreled endlessly, and he thought that it would be extremely unfavorable to the building of the army to continue like this, and after careful consideration, Chairman Mao submitted a request in writing to resign as the director of the former committee at the enlarged meeting of the former committee of the Red Fourth Army.
Chairman Mao's decision shocked everyone, and after some discussion, Zhu De and others decided to abolish the post of Provisional Military Commission and remove Liu Angong from the post of director of the Provisional Military Commission, but the voice of controversy still existed.
In order to reach a unified opinion between all parties in the construction of the Red Army, the Seventh Congress of the Fourth Red Army was held in Longyan City, and the meeting was presided over by the relatively neutral Chen Yi.
The meeting called on everyone to discuss various issues since Jinggangshan, and the deputies at the meeting refuted the propositions put forward by Chairman Mao and Zhu De respectively, and in the final resolution of the meeting, they gave Chairman Mao a "serious warning" within the party and a written warning to Zhu De.
At the same time, the congress re-elected the former committee committee of the Red Fourth Army, and Chairman Mao was originally the former secretary of the committee designated by the CPC Central Committee, but at this moment he was not elected, and it was Chen Yi who was elected.
Chairman Mao was ill at that time, and the results of the congress made him even more exhausted, and he had no choice but to leave the Red Fourth Army and go to western Fujian as a special commissioner to guide local work.
In July 1927, the Kuomintang launched the "three-province attack" against the Red Army, and after the Red Fourth Army lost chairman Mao's guidance, each operational meeting did not discuss the results that could solve practical problems, and even made mistakes in combat strategy, and lost successive defeats in the battle against the Nationalist army.
In order to discuss strategies to resist the enemy, Zhu De and Chen Yi decided to go to Chairman Mao and ask him about military operations. After the discussion, Chen Yi reported alone in Shanghai.
The personal experience of the follow-up operation made Zhu De realize the correctness of chairman Mao's previous proposals, and he once said: "Zhu Mao's Red Army, Zhu can not do without Mao." Just when the Eighth Congress of the Red Fourth Army was about to be held in Shanghang, Fujian Province, Zhu De wanted Chairman Mao to come back to attend the meeting, so he wrote a letter anonymously.
After receiving the letter, Chairman Mao said that if the question of right and wrong within the Red Fourth Army was not resolved, he would not come back, and he was physically ill, and he really did not have more energy to deal with the internal affairs of the army.
Although Chairman Mao refused to be reinstated, he set off for Shanghang. When everyone saw that Chairman Mao was indeed seriously ill, they asked him to stay in Shanghang for a period of recuperation, and then he continued to recuperate with the Transfer of the Minxi Special Committee to Sujiapo.
On the other hand, Chen Yi has successfully arrived in Shanghai to report to the CPC Central Committee. In response to the controversy within the Red Fourth Army, the Politburo of the Communist Party of China decided to set up a committee by Zhou Enlai, Li Lisan, and Chen Yi. Zhou Enlai proposed that Chen Yi draft a letter of instruction, the "September Letter."
The letter affirmed Chairman Mao's "armed division of workers and peasants" and other principles for the building of the Red Army, demanded that the Red Fourth Army should uphold the leadership of Zhu Mao and Mao, that Chairman Mao should remain the secretary of the former committee, and that all the party's power should be concentrated in the front committee, and that the term "patriarchy" must not be mechanically invoked to weaken the power to guide the army.
With this letter, which had been entrusted with a major mission, Chen Yi returned to the Red Fourth Army to report to Zhu De on the instructions given by the Party Central Committee on problems within the army, and at the front committee held that night, he conveyed all the contents of the letter to all the people in the army.
After the meeting, Chen Yi wrote a letter in his pen, in which he said that the dispute between him and Chairman Mao had been correctly resolved, and that he had directly acknowledged the mistakes made at the Seventh and Eighth Congresses of the Fourth Red Army.
In fact, Chen Yi has always admired Chairman Mao's strategy, but on the issue of whether the military's power is centralized or not, each of them has different views.
Chen Yi sent the letter to Chairman Mao, along with the "September Letter," inviting Chairman Mao to return as the former secretary of the party committee, while stressing that this was also the opinion of the Party Central Committee.
After receiving the "September letter," Chairman Mao expressed his acceptance of the CPC Central Committee's arrangement and returned to the Red Fourth Army to resume his duties. This made Zhu De feel very happy, and he said to Chairman Mao: "I take back the words of the past, and I have long been looking forward to your return!" On the same night, Chen Yi also specially prepared wine and dishes for Chairman Mao to pick up the wind and wash the dust.
Mao, Zhu, and Chen finally shook hands and made peace, and in the future war, they will work together and fight side by side until the founding of New China.