"I think Liu Bei is doomed to failure because he has two fatal shortcomings."
This is Chairman Mao's comment on Liu Bei, the monarch of the Shu state, after reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. However, many people have different opinions on this remark, because Liu Bei is the top figure in the three countries, whether in terms of employment ability or personality charm.
Moreover, throughout the ages, how many people have greatly admired Liu Bei. He and Guan Yu and Zhang Fei are three people, brotherly, life and death together. Even in the face of a top talent like Zhuge Liang, he can easily rely on his personal charm to be easily impressed, let him willingly provide for himself to drive, and let the friendship between the two monarchs and courtiers pass on as a good story.
But why is such a successful person doomed to failure? Chairman Mao pointed out the two major shortcomings of Liu Bei, what exactly is it?
Grassroots emperor uncle, reshape the country
At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, when the Han Dynasty was in decline, Liu Bei shouted a sentence "I am after the King of Zhongshan Jing" and entered.
In his childhood, due to the early death of his father Liu Hongying, Liu Bei and his mother could only rely on mat weavers to support their families, although they had prominent ancestors, but by his generation, they had completely become the people at the bottom.
At the age of 15, Liu Bei left home and went out to study, and together with Gongsun Zhan, he worshiped Lu Zhi as a teacher. During this period, Liu Bei guangly married the world's haojie, and by virtue of being loyal and honest, acting brightly and honestly, he won the support of many small partners, and even the Zhongshan merchants Zhang Shiping, Su Shuang and others, carrying thousands of gold funds to fund Liu Bei.
After the outbreak of the Yellow Turban Rebellion, Liu Bei was determined to support the Han Dynasty and save the people from water and fire. In that year, he formed a counterinsurgency army and made a name for himself in the fight to suppress the uprising. After the uprising was quelled, the imperial court made Liu Bei a county lieutenant of Anxi County according to military merit, and as a result, the official position of this county lieutenant was not yet secure, and Liu Bei abandoned his official post because he was not accustomed to the supervision of the fish and meat people.
In the following years, Liu Bei also served as some petty officials, but because of the chaos of the world and the people's hearts, he resigned and went into hiding. It was not until after Dong Zhuo entered the capital that the chaos of the Imperial Dynasty, causing the Humiliation of the Han Emperor and the precariousness of the Han Imperial Family, Liu Bei stood up, and he disregarded the shame and laughter of others and took his own small troops to participate in the joint army against Dong.
Due to his weak strength and small words, Liu Bei finally did not save the Han Emperor, and from that time on, Liu Bei secretly vowed that he would make meritorious achievements in this life, support the Han Room, and reshape the majesty of the Liu royal family.
However, the ideal is beautiful, and the reality is very bone. Liu Bei was attached to everywhere in the warlord melee, and did not even have a place to live, even the hard-won Xuzhou was easily captured by Lü Bu.
Even so, Liu Bei did not give up his pursuit, he repeatedly lost battles, from a poor man to the world-famous Uncle Liu Huang. For such a Liu Bei,
Cao Cao sighed, "Heroes of the world, only the king and the ear." ”
During the Battle of Guandu, Cao Cao defeated the powerful Yuan Shao with a weak victory over the strong, and then swallowed the four continents of Qing, You, He, and Ji, completing the unification of the northern region. Liu Bei had to leave the north and switch to Liu Biao, the assassin of Jingzhou, and live in xinye town to recuperate.
However, even in this case, Liu Bei still did not give up the idea of restoring the Han Room, and firmly wanted to confront the Han thief Cao Cao to the end and fight for the Han Dynasty to the end.
With Cao Cao on the outside and hostility from the Jingzhou family on the inside, Liu Bei summed up his own defeat experience, and sought the coveted strategist Xu Shu, who easily broke Cao Ren's eight golden locks in the Battle of Fancheng and defeated tens of thousands of Elite Cao's army.
When Cao Cao designed to force Xu Shu away, Liu Bei still treated him with courtesy and did not force this rare talent. On the occasion of parting, Xu Shu recommended to Liu Bei Zhuge Liang, a talent who changed the fate of Liu Bei's group, and told Liu Bei that he must personally visit him in order to invite this prodigy of the world.
Liu Bei also accepted Xu Shu's advice and personally went to the Xiangfan area to visit Zhuge Liang, and The Three Gu Maolu showed his sincerity and asked Zhuge Liang for assistance. After receiving Zhuge Liang's assistance, Liu Bei, in accordance with the planned grand pair, united with Sun Quan, the prince of Jiangdong, and defeated the powerful Cao Cao at the Battle of Chibi, causing the northern Yuan Qi to be seriously injured and no longer able to unify the country.
Later, Liu Bei used Liu Biao's eldest son Liu Qi to occupy the land of Jingzhou, and with the help of Pang Tong, who was known as the "Phoenix Chick", he peeked into the Land of Xichuan Shu and successively subdued the fierce generals Huang Zhong, Ma Chao, and Mingshi Fazheng.
At this time, Liu Bei had gradually reached the heyday of the situation, holding Jingzhou and Yizhou in his hands, with fierce generals like clouds and courtiers like rain. During the Battle of Hanzhong, he defeated the northern overlord Cao Cao in one fell swoop and proclaimed himself the King of Hanzhong.
At this time, Liu Bei's power was not inferior to that of Cao Cao and Sun Quan, who inherited his father's brother's inheritance. But why did Chairman Mao think that Liu Bei was bound to lose? What are his flaws?
Emotional things, primary and secondary
For Liu Bei's failure,
After summing up, Chairman Mao held that Liu Liu had two fatal shortcomings, one was that he liked to be emotional, and the other was that there was no distinction between primary and secondary contradictions.
First of all, Liu Bei's emotional affairs, he knew that Guan Yu had the shortcomings of arrogance and conceit in personality, but he still appointed Guan Yu to guard Jingzhou. Before entering Xichuan, it was also possible to explain this problem on the grounds that the number of talents in his hands was limited, but after getting Yizhou and Hanzhong, Liu Bei's subordinates were full of talents, was there no more suitable candidate than Guan Yu?
When Guan Yu defeated Maicheng and died tragically at the hands of his former ally Jiangdong, Liu Bei did not think about the problem of employing people, but instead disregarded the persuasion of many ministers, forcibly opened a major war between Shu and Wu, and finally lost in the Yiling area, resulting in tens of thousands of elite soldiers of the Shu state dying on the battlefield, and even Liu Bei himself almost died on the battlefield.
Since then, the Shu state has been seriously injured, no longer able to fight with others from the frontal battlefield, and can only rely on Zhuge Liang's resourcefulness to barely survive.
In the chairman's view, if Liu Bei could not be emotional, not let Guan Yu lead the army alone, or be able to endure the hatred of Guan Yu's killing, and learn the truth that it is not too late for a gentleman to take revenge for ten years, he would eventually be able to avoid the fiasco that followed, and he could gradually strengthen the Shu kingdom, and finally unify the world and complete the wish of Kuang Fu Han.
The second is Liu Bei's lack of the overall situation, and there is no distinction between primary and secondary contradictions, which is also an important reason for his ultimate failure. When Liu Bei invited Zhuge Liang out of the mountains, Zhuge Liang proposed that Wu resist Wei and eventually achieve the goal of restoring the Han Dynasty.
This strategic policy proved to be entirely correct, and in the early days of Liu Bei's and Sun Quan's cooperation, the two defeated the powerful Cao Cao one after another and seized the Jingzhou region from Cao Cao's hands. In the following years, Sun Liu and Liu's families joined forces to resist the enemy, so that the powerful Cao Cao did not dare to act rashly.
At the time of the Battle of Hanzhong, Liu Bei defeated Cao Cao, who was badly injured, so that the three pairs of Longzhong had completed the two steps of occupying Jingzhou and capturing Yizhou, and only had time to wait for the time to go, send troops to capture Guanzhong, and then sweep the last step of the world.
Liu Bei was suddenly confused and could not tell where the main contradiction of the Shu state was, and after the successive deaths of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, Liu Bei actually ignored the Cao Wei regime, which was the main contradiction, and instead attacked the sun Wu regime with the secondary contradiction.
Chairman Mao himself deeply felt this. During the War of Resistance Against Japan, the Kuomintang reactionaries did not think of defeating the Japanese aggressors as soon as possible, but instead resorted to the communist party that joined forces to resist Japan; in the 1941 Anhui Incident, the Kuomintang reactionaries forced more than 9,000 people of the New Fourth Army to move to the area north of the Yangtze River in the name of resisting Japan.
Unexpectedly, this group of fierce reactionaries, taking advantage of the New Fourth Army's move northward, gathered more than 80,000 people from 7 divisions in the Maolin area of Jing County, Anhui Province, surrounded the soldiers of the New Fourth Army passing by, and wantonly encircled and killed them. Ye Ting, the commander of the New Fourth Army, after leading the troops in a bloody battle for seven days, ran out of ammunition and food, and eventually outnumbered, resulting in the tragic death of anti-Japanese soldiers at the hands of the Kuomintang.
The most heinous thing is that Chiang Kai-shek also filed a complaint against the evildoers, slandering the "defection" of the New Fourth Army and sending Commander Ye Ting to a military court for trial. Naturally, the Communist Party of China did not sit idly by in response to this act, but on the contrary actively issued a speech exposing the sinister face of the Kuomintang reactionaries in sabotaging the War of Resistance and killing the anti-Japanese soldiers.
Chiang Kai-shek, who had been exposed as the truth, began to become angry and carried out an economic blockade of the Communist Party of China and the anti-Japanese base areas, which led to the chinese revolutionary cause once falling into a situation of peril.
In the face of this situation, many comrades within our Party have pointed out: We must not blindly tolerate and allow them to bully, but should have a showdown with Chiang Kai-shek and vigorously crack down on the Kuomintang reactionaries and let them know how powerful we are.
At first, this kind of call was only spread at the grass-roots level of the army, but later many middle-level officers who had suffered persecution by the Kuomintang also agreed with this opinion, and the call to crack down on the Kuomintang reactionaries also became increasingly loud, attracting the attention of the LEADERS of the Communist Party.
It was at this time that Chairman Mao stepped forward and he held an important party and government meeting. At the meeting, Chairman Mao asked, "Have you all seen the Romance of the Three Kingdoms?" ”
All the leaders hesitated slightly, then all nodded. As one of the four famous works in China, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a historical masterpiece that is well known to the Chinese people.
Chairman Mao then asked, "Then what do you think of Liu Bei, the monarch of the Shu state?" ”
One leader eagerly spoke: "He is a hero, kind, kind, and loving the people. ”
Others also opened their mouths: "Liu Bei is a person who is good at using people, and can unite people from all sides, has strong organizational skills, and can firmly attract the hero Haojie to his side." ”
Chairman Mao said, "Yes, Liu Bei has many advantages, and I like him very much, but how did such a heroic figure fail in the end?" ”
For this issue, people in the underground have talked about it a lot, some people say that it is the internal contradiction of Liu Bei's clique, some people say that Guan Yu Zhang Fei died too early, and some people say that Liu Bei's bad luck led to a big war, and all the family foundations of the Shu state were lost.
Chairman Mao listened for a moment, then said, "According to my observation, Liu Liu has two fatal shortcomings, so he will undoubtedly lose." ”
The people in the audience were instantly quiet, wanting to hear what Chairman Mao had in mind. Chairman Mao went on to say: "Liu Bei, a man who could not distinguish between the main contradiction and the secondary contradiction, had not yet been eliminated by the Cao Wei regime that had overthrown the Han Dynasty, so he attacked Eastern Wu, who had a personal grudge, and did things that the enemy was fast and the relatives were painful, how could he not be defeated?" ”
The leaders were also lost in thought, and it seemed that the chairman's analysis was entirely correct.
Chairman Mao continued to strike the railway while it was hot: "We are now in exactly the same situation as Liu Bei, the Kuomintang reactionaries are sneaking up on us from behind, and there are Still Japanese aggressors on the front, and we must find out the main contradiction and the secondary contradiction, the Kuomintang reactionaries are now only our secondary contradictions, and the Japanese aggressors are our main contradictions. ”
After Chairman Mao's remarks, everyone has also completely sobered up, and now the most urgent task is to repel the Japanese aggressors, and the contradiction between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party is purely an internal dispute, and it is not possible to do the situation of self-harm of "the enemy is fast, and the relatives are painful" and destroy the cooperative anti-Japanese united front.
There is an old Chinese saying that "reading history can be wise, and only by knowing the past can we learn from the present." It was through reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms that Chairman Mao discovered Liu Bei's flaws and learned the lessons of history, thus leading the Communist Party of China on the road to success.