There are often very occasional events in history that happen suddenly, and it can unexpectedly change the course of many things, including the fate of countless people in the event.
As soon as the Red Army's Long March reached northern Shaanxi, Chiang Kai-shek had already arranged for his sixth encirclement and suppression. At that time, Chiang Kai-shek's heart was ecstatic, because tens of thousands of Red Army troops were driven by him to the barren and few northern Shaanxi, where there was no food or clothing, and there was no mountain to hide, no longer threatening Jiangnan, the core area of Chiang Kai-shek's rule.
Chiang Kai-shek believed that this time the Red Army would never have a chance to turn around again.
Chiang Kai-shek was providing assistance before the war to encircle and suppress the Red Army
The strength of the Red Army at that time: only more than 30,000 guns, equivalent to Chiang Kai-shek's three ordinary divisions.
After a long long march, the Central Red Army suffered huge losses. The Red Army, which had 85,000 combat troops at the beginning of the Long March, reached northern Shaanxi with fewer than 7,000 men. The Red Second Front (including the Red 32nd Army) had a total of less than 7,700 men. The Red 25th Army was about 3,400 men. There are more red four soldiers, about 34,000 people.
However, the Eastern And Western Expeditions caused huge losses to the Red Army, and at this time, together with the original Red Army in northern Shaanxi, the total number was less than 30,000 (Mao Zedong said in his speech inspecting the south in 1971: "The Red Army was 300,000 before the Long March. There are 25,000 people left in northern Shaanxi).
It is also not large in terms of area under control, there are about 30 counties, and the total population of the control area should be around 3.5 million people. Such an area and population cannot support an army of more than 30,000 people.
So the situation in the Red Army is really grim.
Second, Chiang Kai-shek's arrangement at that time, he mobilized about 300,000 troops in 260 regiments of elite troops of the Yan clan, with Jiang Dingwen as the commander-in-chief of the former enemy in the northwest.
Chiang Kai-shek saw that the number of the Red Army had been greatly reduced after the Long March, so he decided that this was the best opportunity to eliminate the Red Army and step on the Shaanxi-Gansu base area, because . At this time, Chiang Kai-shek had already put down Chen Jitang and Li Zongren's "Two Guangdong Incidents" and began to concentrate his army in northern Shaanxi to prepare for the sixth encirclement and suppression of the Red Army that had reached the revolutionary base areas in Shaanxi and Gansu.
The base area of the Red Army in northern Shaanxi
Jiang Dingwen
1. Chiang Kai-shek also appointed Wei Lihuang as the commander-in-chief of the suppression of bandits in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Suining Border Region, and Chen Cheng, deputy director of the Military and Political Department, to supervise the army, and built and expanded the xi'an and Lanzhou airfields, and prepared ground handling equipment for 100 bombers.
2. When these events were almost ready, Chiang Kai-shek himself came to Xi'an to sit in the town, and he wanted to devote himself to the battle.
In fact, if you count Zhang Xueliang's 200,000 Northeast Army and Yang Hucheng's 100,000 Northwest Army, Chiang Kai-shek had already deployed 600,000 troops in the northwest at that time.
Wei Lihuang
Chiang Kai-shek did not believe that Zhang Yang dared to resist him, but it was because of this wrong judgment that Chiang Kai-shek himself was imprisoned in the Xi'an Incident.
Chiang Kai-shek naturally knew that the Northeast Army and the Northwest Army were already very dissatisfied with his non-resistance to Japan, but he still came to Xi'an.
Chiang Kai-shek had already drawn up a plan in his mind to deal with Zhang and Yang: If Zhang and Yang disobeyed the order to enter and suppress the Shaanxi-Gansu region, they would transfer the Northeast Army and the Seventeenth Route Army out of Shaanxi and Gansu, the Northeast Army to Fujian, and the Seventeenth Route Army to Anhui.
Chang
1. Zhang Xueliang's two thoughts at that time: Zhang Zuolin was killed by the Japanese, the northeast territory was stolen by the Japanese, and Zhang Xueliang had a family hatred for the Japanese; on the other hand, because of non-resistance, Zhang Xueliang was charged with the shame of treason, and before the Xi'an Incident, Zhang Xueliang wanted Jiang to agree to his anti-Japanese ideas.
Zhang Xueliang fantasized that Chiang Kai-shek could lead the whole nation to resist Japan in unison.
2. Although Yang Hucheng was a bandit-born Northwest Army, he was also a patriotic general, and he also actively demanded resistance against Japan at that time.
Yang Hucheng
3. Neither Zhang nor Yang wanted their troops to be wiped out in the confrontation with the Red Army.
Chiang Kai-shek's appointment of Jiang Dingwen and Wei Lihuang to encircle and suppress the Red Army was actually tantamount to revoking Zhang Xueliang's powers as deputy commander and acting commander-in-chief of the Northwest "Suppression General" and director of Yang Hucheng's Xi'an Appeasement Office.
Zhang and Yang were naturally very dissatisfied with this appointment, and Chiang Kai-shek mobilized 300,000 troops to gather on the Pinghan Line and the Longhai Line, which made Zhang and Yang Rumang even more back.
At that time, Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng had no way to go except for the military advice of "forcing Chiang Kai-shek to resist Japan."
In the early morning of December 12, 1936, the Xi'an Incident broke out and shocked the whole country.
In the Xi'an Incident, Zhang Yang captured Chiang Kai-shek
Through negotiations Chiang Kai-shek agreed to unite with the Communists to resist Japan, and his sixth plan to encircle and suppress the Red Army was completely bankrupt. After the Xi'an Incident, Chiang Kai-shek wrote in his diary: "This incident has been a major setback in the course of our National Revolution. Eight years of efforts to suppress bandits are expected to be able to compete for full strength in two weeks to one month, and almost all of them will be destroyed. ”
Chairman Mao was in northern Shaanxi
Conclusion: The situation faced by the Communist Party and the Red Army in which they were encircled and suppressed was fundamentally changed, and the Red Army in the north was reorganized into the Eighth Route Army to cross the Yellow River in the east and has continued to grow behind enemy lines ever since. Therefore, the Xi'an incident changed not only the fate of Chiang Kai-shek personally, nor the fate of Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, but also the fate of the Communist Party and the Red Army, and the fate of China as a whole.